Airbound, a Bengaluru-based aerospace startup developing lightweight autonomous aircraft for deliveries, has raised $37 million in a Series A round led by Greenoaks. The round also includes existing and new investors including DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures. Airbound said the latest financing takes its total capital raised since its 2023 launch to nearly $50 million, including a$8.65 millionseed funding round in October. The company plans to use the money to accelerate engineering, commercial-scale manufacturing and its go-to-market efforts. That marks a shift from demonstrating the technology towards building the capacity and commercial infrastructure needed for larger-scale operations. The startup said its aircraft have already completed more than1,000 autonomous flightswith Narayana Health, carrying diagnostic samples between healthcare facilities and cutting delivery times from hours to minutes, with no mission failures reported in those flights. Airbound’s central argument is that conventional aircraft are inefficient for small payloads because much of their weight is devoted to carrying the aircraft itself. The company is designing an aircraft architecture that seeks to reverse that balance, so that a greater share of the weight in flight is the material being transported. Its current aircraft uses a blended wing body tailsitter design, combining the vertical take-off capability of a drone with the efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft. Thecommercial test now underwayis in Andhra Pradesh. Under an agreement announced earlier this year by the company, Airbound plans to build a drone delivery network connecting three cities and eventually scale to 10,000 flights a day across retail, e-commerce and healthcare. The company believes the project is a potential model for wider aerial delivery in India. “The bar for delivery in India is high. The benchmark is 10 minutes to your doorstep, at an extremely low cost. That’s the complexity here,” said Founder and chief executive officer Naman Pushp. “If you can build something that works in India, it tends to work anywhere.” Pushp noted the underlying ambition is to alter the economics of moving goods, arguing that “better physics leads to better economics”. He has explained the longer-term objective even more broadly, with Airbound expecting the same technology could eventually support passenger transport. The company sees a future where a 300-kilometre journey is being completed in about 20 minutes. The funding comes as drone logistics moves from pilot projects towards larger commercial networks. Delhi-based Skye Air Mobility raised$9 millionin a Series B round in March, led by IAN Alpha Fund, to expand beyond Delhi-NCR, and to strengthen its drone operations, airspace-management and autonomous logistics systems. Neil Shah, Partner at Greenoak said Airbound could overcome the longstanding trade-off between the speed of air freight and the low cost of road transport. “When one auto
