Airbound raises $37 million Series A to scale drone delivery and build larger aircraft
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Bengaluru-based aerospace startup Airbound has raised $37 million in a Series A round led by Greenoaks as it looks to scale its autonomous aircraft and expand commercial drone deliveries across India. The round saw participation from new and existing investors including DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures. Airbound has now raised nearly $50 million since launching in 2023, with an initial seed round of $8.65 million raised less than a year ago.
The funding will go towards engineering, commercial-scale manufacturing and go-to-market efforts. But for founder and CEO Naman Pushp, the bigger opportunity is not simply to build a better delivery drone. He believes the technology Airbound has developed at a small scale can eventually be used to build much larger aircraft.
“We haven’t just built incredibly cost-effective delivery drones. We’ve built a template for better aircraft,” Pushp told Fortune India.
“What we’ve done is actually find a pathway to bring down the cost of flying over and over. The physics of flying is the same whether you’re building a tiny one-metre wingspan aircraft or a huge aircraft.”
From a 1-kg drone to aircraft that could compete with trucks
Airbound’s current flagship aircraft, the DRT, is designed to carry a roughly 1-kg payload. Pushp describes it as a demonstration of the company’s ability to make aerial delivery economically competitive with ground transport.
The next step is a larger aircraft with a payload capacity of around 5 kg. “The DRT was built to be competitive with scooters. The next aircraft will be built to be competitive with the Tata Ace. And the aircraft after that will be built to be competitive with the 20-ton truck,” Pushp said.
The company’s strategy is to refine the technology at a smaller scale, where it can iterate faster and at lower cost, before scaling it up.
That also explains Airbound’s longer-term ambition. Pushp does not see the company as simply a drone-delivery operator. It ultimately wants to develop aircraft capable of moving both goods and people.
Airbound’s current aircraft uses a blended-wing-body tailsitter design that can take off vertically and transition into horizontal flight. Its current TRT model is listed by the company at around 2.5 kg all-up weight, with a payload of roughly 1 kg and a range of around 40 km.
Airbound wants to be more than a logistics company
Airbound does not plan to sell its aircraft to customers. Instead, it wants to provide the delivery as a service while retaining control of the aircraft and its technology.
Pushp compares the model to autonomous mobility companies such as Waymo and Tesla. “Waymo would never sell their cars. It’s the service that comes up as a product,” he said. “We’re a product company, not a services company. But we are selling the delivery itself.”
His comparison is ultimately closer to an aerospace manufacturer than a traditional logistics company.
“We’re not interested in being an airline or an airport. We’re interested in being the air company,” Pushp said. “We’re interested in being the modern-day Boeing.”
Rather than building a fleet for one particular customer, Airbound wants its aircraft to become a platform that can serve different categories of deliveries.
Healthcare is the starting point, e-commerce the bigger volume opportunity
Healthcare is currently one of the company’s most important use cases. Airbound has completed more than 1,000 autonomous flights with Narayana Health, transporting diagnostic samples between healthcare facilities. The company says those flights have had zero mission failures and reduced delivery times from hours to minutes.
As the regulatory environment develops, Airbound expects higher-volume categories such as e-commerce to become more important. “We’re particularly interested in markets that can give us a lot of scale at these small neighbourhood sizes,” Pushp said. “So this is really a lot of your e-commerce delivery, where you get a lot of those volumes.”
The company has been selective about customers because its capacity is limited and it wants deployments to generate product learnings. Narayana Health is currently the only customer Airbound has publicly named.
Pushp said there is interest from customers outside India as well, with the company looking to expand internationally over time.
What the MoU with Andhra Pradesh is about
The Series A announcement comes alongside Airbound’s commercial deployment agreement with Andhra Pradesh. Under the agreement, Airbound plans to build a drone-delivery network connecting three cities and eventually scale it to 10,000 daily flights across retail, e-commerce and healthcare.
The significance goes beyond a single delivery route. According to Pushp, Airbound has been working with the aviation ministry and Andhra Pradesh authorities on a framework that could allow drone delivery across an entire city, rather than requiring separate approvals for individual routes or companies.
The aim is to create a mesh network that can eventually be used by multiple businesses, including smaller establishments. Airbound sees the Andhra Pradesh programme as a potential template for scaling aerial logistics across India.
Regulation and supply chains remain barriers to scale
Pushp says the industry’s challenges are not simply about getting more companies to use drones. One problem is that India’s existing certification framework is largely designed around mature aircraft. He argues that startups developing new aircraft need a framework that allows them to operate, learn from customers and continuously improve their designs rather than treating the aircraft as a finished product from the beginning.
“There is no framework which says, ‘Let me go out into the real world, learn from customers, update my design and continually improve.’ There is no scope for improving on the field,” he said.
Supply chains are another challenge. Airbound is trying to move towards higher-grade materials such as carbon fibre, but Pushp said import and export restrictions can make some materials difficult for Indian aerospace companies to access.
He wants India to develop stronger trade arrangements with major producers such as the European Union and Japan so domestic companies can access higher-grade inputs and build more advanced aircraft.