Airbound Raises $37M to Push Drone Delivery Toward Trucking Costs

Airbound, an Indian startup building autonomous drones, raised $37 million in fresh capital to make aerial goods movement as cheap as trucking by road. The Series A was led by Greenoaks, with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures. The round follows an $8.65 million seed round less than a year earlier and brings the three-year-old startup’s total funding to nearly $50 million.

Airbound is trying to improve drone delivery economics by redesigning the aircraft itself. Its current TRT drone weighs about 3.3 pounds and carries around 2.2 pounds of payload, while the next version under development is expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds and carry up to 11 pounds. The company uses a rocket-like tail-sitter design that takes off and lands vertically before shifting into horizontal flight, helping avoid dependence on runways.

Airbound has completed more than 13,000 autonomous flights across Bengaluru and Guntur, including more than 1,000 flights with Narayana Health. On one Narayana route, a single active drone transports diagnostic samples about 2.5 miles in around seven minutes. By comparison, the same samples can take three to five hours by truck when waiting time for bundled road transport is included, according to founder and CEO Naman Pushp.

Airbound has signed an agreement with the Andhra Pradesh government tied to a planned three-city drone delivery network, with an eventual target of 10,000 flights a day for retail, e-commerce and healthcare deliveries. Pushp said the agreement does not include a government contract or subsidy, and that the state is working with Airbound on the regulatory framework. The company sees beyond visual line of sight approvals as a key bottleneck, and remains broadly pre-revenue despite having more than 150 employees.