India’s Airbound bags $37M to take on trucks with rocket-like drones

Airbound, an Indian startup building autonomous drones, has raised $37 million in fresh capital as it pushes to make moving goods through the air as cheap as trucking them by road.

The Series A round, led by Greenoaks with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures, comes less than a year after Airbound raised an $8.65 million seed round. With this funding, the three-year-old startup has raised nearly $50 million.

Airbound, and other startups in this nascent sector, argue that drones can move certain goods faster and cheaper than vehicles on the road. And while there have been successful deployments, drone delivery is still far from matching the scale and versatility of trucking.

Airbound is trying to close that gap by redesigning the aircraft to make it more competitive with ground transportation.

Conventional aircraft spend a lot of energy carrying their own weight rather than the payload, making flight expensive, particularly for moving smaller loads. Airbound’s answer is to build vertical-flight drones designed to weigh less than the cargo they carry, founder and CEO Naman Pushp said in an interview.

Airbound’s current drone, called TRT, weighs about 3.3 pounds and can carry around 2.2 pounds of payload. Its next version, currently under development, is expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds and be able to carry up to 11 pounds, Pushp told TechCrunch.

The startup uses a rocket-like, tail-sitter design for its drones, which takes off and lands vertically in an upright position before transitioning to horizontal flight. Pushp said Airbound intends to retain vertical takeoff and landing even as it develops larger aircraft to avoid dependence on runways.

“We want to build towards a world where everything has cost parity with trucking,” he said.

Founded in 2023, Airbound has completed more than 13,000 autonomous flights across the southern Indian cities of Bengaluru and Guntur, Pushp said. That includes more than 1,000 flights with the Indian hospital network Narayana Health, where its drones transport diagnostic samples between healthcare facilities.

The startup uses a single active drone on the Narayana route, flying diagnostic samples about 2.5 miles in around seven minutes. The same samples can take three to five hours to be transported by two-wheelers when factoring in the time spent waiting for enough samples to be bundled for road transport, according to Pushp.

That partnership is expanding to include Narayana’s new Banashankari hospital in Bengaluru, which was designed without an on-site diagnostic lab or blood bank and will instead rely on Airbound’s drones to connect with centralized facilities.

Three-city drone network

Airbound has set its sights on a far larger ambition to create a drone delivery network that connects three cities in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The startup has sign an agreement with the state government with an eventual target of 10,000 flights a day for retail, e-commerce, and healthcare deliveries. That daily flight target will require between 250 and 1,000 aircraft, depending on route lengths, though Pushp expects the number to be closer to 250.

The agreement does not involve a government contract or subsidy, Pushp said, adding that the Andhra Pradesh government is working with Airbound on the regulatory framework needed to enable the network. The startup expects to generate business from companies using it for deliveries.

Indian startups including Skye Air Mobility and TSAW Drones are already building aerial logistics businesses, while other Indian drone makers such as Garuda Aerospace have also explored delivery use cases. Nonetheless, Pushp argues that Airbound wants to build the aircraft that other logistics networks could eventually use rather than just trying to become the largest delivery operator.

“That’s the Boeing role — the aircraft airlines everywhere rely on, not the airline itself,” he said.

Airbound designs and manufactures its aircraft in a 43,000-square-foot facility in Bengaluru, where it keeps work on the airframe and other core systems in-house. While Pushp declined to disclose its production capacity or how many aircraft the startup has built so far, he said manufacturing would not be the bottleneck as Airbound scales.

The bigger bottleneck, Pushp noted, is regulation, particularly securing approvals for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, a certification that allows drones to fly beyond the direct sight of an operator and is critical to operating delivery networks at scale.

Those regulatory constraints have also limited Airbound’s ability to turn its flights into meaningful commercial revenue. Moreover, the startup remains broadly pre-revenue despite having a team of more than 150 employees.

“The goal is to be a giant in a few decades, not to make revenue as soon as we can,” Pushp said.