Airbound, an Indian startup building autonomous delivery drones, has scored $37M in Series A funding led by Greenoaks. DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures joined the round, which lands less than a year after an $8.65M seed and brings the three-year-old company’s total raised to nearly $50M.
The startup is chasing cost parity with trucking by redesigning the aircraft itself. Conventional drones burn most of their energy carrying their own weight, so Airbound builds tail-sitter aircraft that take off and land vertically and weigh less than the cargo they carry. Its current model, the TRT, weighs about 3.3 pounds and carries roughly 2.2 pounds; a next-generation version in development is expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds and carry up to 11 pounds.
Airbound, which began operations in 2023, has logged more than 13,000 autonomous flights in Bengaluru and Guntur. Its flagship deployment is with the Narayana Health chain: one drone carries diagnostic samples roughly 2.5 miles in about seven minutes, where road transport can take three to five hours once samples are batched for pickup. A new Narayana hospital in Bengaluru’s Banashankari district was built without an on-site diagnostic lab or blood bank and will depend on Airbound’s aircraft to reach central facilities.
Pushp says the company intends to keep vertical takeoff and landing even as it builds larger aircraft, avoiding any dependence on runways.
