Aerospace startup Airbound raises $37 mn to expand autonomous aircraft biz

The Bengaluru aerospace startup will use the Series A capital to scale engineering and manufacturing, while its Andhra Pradesh network is planned to handle up to 10,000 daily flights

Airbound, a Bengaluru-based aerospace startup developing lightweight autonomous aircraft for deliveries, has raised $37 million in Series A funding. It has also signed an agreement with Andhra Pradesh to develop a three-city drone delivery network, marking a step towards commercialising its aircraft and expanding their use in logistics.

 

The funding round was led by Greenoaks, with participation from new and existing investors including DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures. Since launching in 2023, Airbound has raised nearly $50 million.

 

Airbound said the Series A financing will be used to accelerate engineering, commercial-scale manufacturing and go-to-market initiatives.

 

“We believe in a world where all movement happens in the air. Not some of it. Not most of it. All of it. A world where flying is cheaper than taking the bus, where moving a single package costs less than moving 20 tons by truck, and where we look at cars the way we look at horses today,” said Naman Pushp, founder and chief executive officer of Airbound.

   

“Better physics leads to better economics, which unlocks the potential to move people and goods for a fraction of a cent. That is what we’re building at Airbound,” he added.

 

Airbound combines advances in autonomy and materials science with what it describes as a physics-first approach, developing transport aircraft designed to weigh less than the payload they move.

 

The company said carrying a single passenger, or roughly 100 kg of cargo, typically requires a purpose-built aircraft weighing around 400 kg once fuel and payload are included, meaning most of the weight is spent lifting the aircraft itself rather than the payload. Airbound said its aircraft are designed to reverse that equation so that the majority of weight in flight is the payload being transported.

 

“Moving goods has always forced a choice between fast and cheap,” said Neil Shah, partner at Greenoaks. “Trucks are cheap and slow, planes are fast and expensive, and nothing has broken the trade-off in more than a century. Airbound does. When one autonomous aircraft can move a single package with the cost efficiency of a fully loaded 20-ton truck, fast delivery and cheap delivery are no longer in tension, and roads stop being the default.”

 

Designed, manufactured and deployed in India, Airbound’s aircraft are built and tested domestically. The company said it has already completed more than 1,000 autonomous flights with zero mission failures in partnership with Narayana Health, transporting diagnostic samples between healthcare facilities and reducing delivery times from hours to minutes.

 

Under its agreement with Andhra Pradesh, Airbound will build a drone delivery network connecting three cities to enable faster and lower-cost transportation.

 

The company plans to scale the network to 10,000 daily flights, supporting retail, e-commerce and healthcare deliveries across the region. Airbound said the programme could serve as a model for wider aerial delivery operations across the country.

 

“The bar for delivery in India is high. The benchmark is 10 minutes to your doorstep, at an extremely low cost. That’s the complexity here,” said Pushp. “If you can build something that works in India, it tends to work anywhere.”

 

“We're excited about the bold new approaches emerging in autonomous delivery, and we love backing teams tackling hard problems,” said Harrison Shih, head of product for DoorDash Labs. “What drew us to Airbound is their willingness to go back to first principles and take on the physics and cost constraints that are keeping aerial delivery from being ubiquitous. Their progress in India, one of the world's most demanding operating environments, shows what passionate engineering can do, and we're eager to see what they build.”

 

Airbound eventually plans to apply the same aircraft technology beyond package delivery to freight and, over time, passenger transportation between cities.