Airbound Raises $37 Mn To Crack The Economics Of Drone Deliveries

Bengaluru-based aerospace company Airbound is looking to expand research and development (R&D) and scale its existing operations after raising $37 million in a Series A round, Founder and CEO Naman Pushp told Outlook Business.

He added that the company is also aiming to build larger aircraft and target facilitating human movement.

Airbound announced on Tuesday that it had raised $37 million in its Series A, led by Greenoaks, with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures. The company said it has raised nearly $50 million since its launch in 2023.

"We’re going to use the money in mainly two things. One is research and development (R&D), and second is scaling the impact and operations of what we've created," Pushp said.

Scaling Drone Deliveries

Airbound said that it has completed more than 1,000 autonomous flights with Narayana Health, with zero mission failures, transporting diagnostic samples between healthcare facilities.

The company has also signed a commercial deployment agreement with Andhra Pradesh government. Under the programme, Airbound plans to build a drone delivery network connecting three cities and scale to 10,000 daily flights across retail, e-commerce and healthcare.

Elaborating on the plans of the company, Pushp said Airbound aims to increase production of its existing aircraft while using the new capital to develop larger and more capable platforms. The founder said that the whole journey is about "building bigger and more capable platforms and continuously improving the technology."

"The case studies that we’ve been able to show with Narayana Health, we intend to show this with more customers. We intend to scale up the production of our current aircraft, the TRT, far more, and show that we can make drone delivery work at scale," he said.

Bigger Aircraft, New Applications

Pushp said Airbound’s ambitions extend beyond last-mile delivery, arguing that the underlying technology can be applied to larger aircraft.

"We’re not just competing in last-mile delivery and solving for that; we’re also able to redefine the way freight works, redefine the way human movement works, and really redefine the way all of our movement in this world happens," he said.

He said Airbound’s approach is centred on using carbon fibre differently from conventional aircraft design. The company believes that redesigning aircraft around the properties of the material can improve efficiency rather than simply substituting carbon fibre for metal structures.

Airbound is also in discussions with private companies across sectors and geographies, although Pushp did not name them.

Aiming Human Movements

Ask Pushp on Airbound's ambitions of facilitating human movements, and whether he thought it's a far off proposition, he admitted that it is "obviously a big leap" in weight class, but said "that is the beauty of the physics that it scales very well."

Pushp said that the company has "unlocked ways to work with a thousand-fold increase in scale".

"We have unlocked manufacturing capabilities and an understanding of aerospace that nobody else has, and that will allow us to make these bigger systems far more efficiently," Pushp said. "So yes, it is a big leap and it will take time, but I think we will see these platforms a lot sooner than you might expect," he remarked.