Indian drone startup Airbound has raised $8.65 million in seed funding led by Physical Intelligence co-founder Lachy Groom to begin piloting drone deliveries with private hospitals and aim for penny deliveries using ultra-light, blended wing-body aircraft.
The seed round includes participation from Humba Ventures and Airbound’s existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as senior executives from Tesla, SpaceX, and Anduril.
Founded in 2020 by then-15-year-old, now 20-year-old Naman Pushp, Airbound has developed an aircraft with a tail-sitter design (where the drone sits vertically and launches upright like a rocket) and a carbon fiber frame, aiming to deliver packages up to 20 times cheaper than traditional methods and significantly cheaper than existing drone delivery systems. The aircraft uses a mixed wing-fuselage shape with two propellers, rather than the more common quadcopter configuration. This allows the aircraft to take off like a rocket and fly like an airplane.
Airbound is targeting penny deliveries by rethinking how energy is used to move goods, Founder and CEO Push said in an interview.
Typically, electric two-wheelers are used in India to carry loads weighing less than 3 kilograms, Push told TechCrunch, even though the vehicle itself weighs about 150 kilograms (331 pounds) and has an energy cost of about 2 pounds (about $0.02) per kilometer. Airbound aims to reduce that cost to 10 paise (approximately $0.001) using its drone, called TRT. The drone is specifically built for small payloads, eliminating the need for a human driver and reducing total transport weight by approximately 30 times. This would reduce energy costs per kilogram by a factor of 20, making 1-cent drone delivery a viable end-state, Pusch said.
“In fact, there is an incredible gap between the current state of drones and their potential,” the founders said. “It takes a 4 kg drone to lift a 1 kg payload, which to me is insane. Range is a broken metric. Drones have no concept of aerodynamic efficiency.”[right now]”
The aircraft’s rocket-like blended wing design eliminates the need for additional propellers and heavy moving parts, improving aerodynamic efficiency compared to traditional quadcopters. By avoiding propellers that obstruct airflow over the wings, the drone maintains a higher lift-to-drag ratio, reducing the amount of thrust needed to stay airborne and making forward flight much more energy efficient, the founders told TechCrunch.
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The first version of Airbound’s drone weighs 3.3 pounds and can carry a payload of up to 2.2 pounds. The startup also aims for the second version to support a payload of 6.6 pounds while weighing just 2.6 pounds.
Pusch said a second version prototype is expected to be ready and flying by the middle of next year, with production targeted for the first quarter of 2027.
“When you enter the world of autonomy, logistics becomes just a physics problem. It’s a game of efficiency and weight. So if you weigh less than everyone else and you’re more efficient than everyone else, you win,” Push says.
He started working on Airbound during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, inspired by a video from Zipline, an on-demand drone delivery company. He submitted an early prototype (built from 2D slices held together with toothpicks and tape and polished to resemble a fiberglass body) to a hackathon and won a $500 grant. This experience inspired him to apply to Y Combinator, but he was not accepted. Instead, he received a $1,000 grant from the 1517 Fund in 2021, followed by a $25,000 check from Grad Capital and a $12,000 grant from Emergent Ventures.
Push received a term sheet from Lightspeed when he was 17 years old, but he waited until after his 18th birthday to sign it. “This was the first legally binding document I signed,” he recalled.
The aircraft is equipped with lithium-ion batteries instead of the commonly used lithium-polymer battery packs. Pusch said lithium-ion batteries typically have a cycle life of 500 to 800 cycles, while lithium polymers have a lifespan of about 100 to 200 cycles.
“The biggest cost of operating these drones ends up being the cost of replacing the batteries,” he says.
Airbound’s drones cost $2,000 to build and ₹24 (about $0.27) per delivery. The company aims to reduce shipping costs to less than 5 ₹ (approximately $0.05) by the end of 2026. The company also expects to reach 1 million deliveries per day by mid-2027, and plans to increase its manufacturing capacity to more than 100 drones per day to achieve that goal. This is higher than the company’s current drone production rate (one drone per day) at its Bangalore facility.
Airbound has launched its first pilot program with Narayana Health in Bangalore, through which it will provide medical logistics for three months and aims to complete 10 deliveries a day of medical tests, blood samples and other critical supplies.
But Airbound is also targeting other areas, including quick commerce, food delivery, and “some other smaller areas in the last mile” delivery, the founders told TechCrunch.
Airbound also plans to move beyond India and enter the US within three years after scaling to 1 million deliveries per day. Meanwhile, the startup is also in talks with regulators, including the Directorate General of Civil Aviation of India, to start flying soon.
To date, Airbound has raised more than $10 million in total funding and has a team of 50 people.
The latest funding round will help the company expand its manufacturing capacity and expand its business. The pilot program will also help improve service and reduce costs, allowing it to better prepare for broader market introduction in 2026, the company said.
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