India's Airbound raises $37M to challenge trucking with delivery drones

Airbound, an Indian startup building autonomous drones, has raised $37 million in a Series A round led by Greenoaks, with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures — less than a year after an $8.65 million seed round. The three-year-old startup has now raised nearly $50 million.

Airbound argues that drones can move certain goods faster and cheaper than road vehicles, and is trying to close the gap between drone delivery’s current scale and trucking’s by redesigning the aircraft itself. Conventional aircraft spend a lot of energy carrying their own weight rather than payload, making flight expensive for smaller loads; Airbound’s answer is vertical-flight drones built to weigh less than the cargo they carry, founder and CEO Naman Pushp said. Its current drone, TRT, weighs about 3.3 pounds and can carry around 2.2 pounds of payload; its next version, under development, is expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds and carry up to 11 pounds. The startup uses a rocket-like, tail-sitter design that takes off and lands vertically before transitioning to horizontal flight — a vertical-landing approach Pushp said Airbound intends to keep even as it builds larger aircraft, to avoid depending 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, including more than 1,000 flights transporting diagnostic samples for hospital network Narayana Health — a route where a single active drone flies samples about 2.5 miles in around seven minutes, versus three to five hours by two-wheeler once wait times for bundling are factored in. That partnership is expanding to Narayana’s new Banashankari hospital in Bengaluru, which was built without an on-site lab or blood bank and will rely on Airbound’s drones instead. The startup has also signed an agreement with the Andhra Pradesh state government targeting 10,000 flights a day across three cities for retail, e-commerce, and healthcare deliveries — a target Pushp said would require 250 to 1,000 aircraft depending on route lengths, though he expects the number to land closer to 250; the deal involves no government contract or subsidy, he said, with the state instead helping build the needed regulatory framework. The bigger bottleneck, Pushp said, is regulation — particularly approvals for beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations — which has also limited the startup’s ability to turn flights into meaningful revenue; Airbound remains broadly pre-revenue despite 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,” he said.

Why it matters

Airbound is betting its edge comes from designing the aircraft other logistics networks could eventually use rather than from operating deliveries itself — “the Boeing role,” as Pushp put it — a bet that depends on regulators approving long-range autonomous flights before the model can prove out at scale.