Lachy Groom backs startup aiming to keep aircraft aloft for a year

Prominent solo investor Lachy Groom has backed Alteon, a Bengaluru startup attempting to keep an aircraft aloft for more than a year by harvesting energy from ocean winds. Founded by 20-year-old Samay Sanghvi, Alteon announced Tuesday that it raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Groom, with participation from Together Fund, to develop autonomous aircraft inspired by dynamic soaring — a technique albatrosses use to extract energy from wind. Groom decided he wanted to invest within the first 30 minutes of their first meeting, Sanghvi told TechCrunch.

Conventional aircraft need to carry the fuel or battery power required for a flight. Alteon is trying to break that limitation with a small, fixed-wing autonomous aircraft that extracts energy from wind shear above the ocean through dynamic soaring — a maneuver in which the aircraft repeatedly moves between layers of air traveling at different speeds. “Once you build airplanes that can stay in the air for more than a year, there are millions of things you can do with them,” Sanghvi said. Alteon plans to initially use the aircraft for maritime surveillance, giving governments real-time visibility into activity in their waters.

The initial design has a roughly 3-meter wingspan and flies close to the ocean’s surface, climbing and turning through faster-moving air to gain energy from the wind before eventually using its propellers as turbines to recharge its batteries. The startup has not yet demonstrated that its aircraft can sustain flight purely on harvested energy, but it recently completed seven O-shaped cycles over the Bay of Bengal at more than 62 miles per hour, flying within 1 meter of the water’s surface. Alteon’s next milestone is what Sanghvi calls “energy-neutral dynamic soaring,” flying continuously with propulsion switched off.

Outside experts see promise but caution the harder test lies ahead. Dr. Gabriel Bousquet, an aerospace and robotics engineer who researched dynamic soaring during his PhD at MIT, called Alteon’s low-altitude flight over water a “promising first result,” while cautioning that reliably extracting enough energy from real-world winds — amid turbulence, waves, spray, rain, and changing light — will be harder to prove. Dr. Bharath Swaminathan, who studied the stability of dynamic soaring for his PhD at IIT Madras, called the underlying physics well established and Alteon’s effort commendable, though he warned that local wind shear and turbulence can vary substantially even when large-scale conditions are predictable. Sanghvi began building and crashing radio-controlled models straight out of high school in 2023 before formally founding Alteon in 2025; the startup has since conducted more than 200 test flights in the past 30 days.

Why it matters

If Alteon can prove its aircraft can sustain themselves on ocean wind energy alone, it would open persistent, low-cost aerial surveillance for governments monitoring their waters — without the fuel or battery constraints that limit today’s drones.