Airbound Raises $37M to Take on Trucks with Lightweight Drones

According to the report, the three-year-old company, founded in 2023, has completed more than 13,000 autonomous flights across the southern Indian cities of Bengaluru and Guntur. That includes over 1,000 flights for hospital network Narayana Health, where its drones carry diagnostic samples between healthcare facilities.

Airbound is trying to make drones competitive with ground transportation by redesigning the aircraft. Conventional aircraft spend much of their energy carrying their own weight rather than payload, making flight expensive, especially for smaller loads. Airbound’s solution is to build vertical-flight drones that weigh less than the cargo they carry, founder and CEO Naman Pushp told TechCrunch. The current drone, called TRT, weighs about 3.3 pounds and carries about 2.2 pounds of payload. The next version, in development, is expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds and carry up to 11 pounds.

The startup uses a rocket-like tail-sitter design that takes off and lands vertically in an upright position before transitioning to horizontal flight. Pushp said Airbound intends to retain vertical takeoff and landing as it develops larger aircraft to avoid dependence on runways.

In the Narayana Health partnership, Airbound uses a single active drone on a route of about 2.5 miles, flying diagnostic samples in around seven minutes. The same samples can take three to five hours by truck when factoring in time spent waiting for enough samples to be bundled for road transport, according to Pushp. The collaboration is expanding to Narayana’s new Banashankari hospital in Bengaluru, which was designed without an on-site diagnostic lab or blood bank and will rely on Airbound’s drones to connect with centralized facilities.

Airbound has a larger ambition of creating a drone delivery network that connects three cities in the state of Andhra Pradesh. It has signed an agreement with the state government with an eventual target of 10,000 flights a day for retail, e-commerce, and healthcare deliveries, according to the report. That daily flight target would require between 250 and 1,000 aircraft, depending on route lengths, though Pushp expects the number to be closer to 250. The agreement does not involve a government contract or subsidy, Pushp said, adding that the Andhra Pradesh government is working with Airbound on the regulatory framework needed to enable the network.

Other Indian startups including Skye Air Mobility and TSAW Drones are already building aerial logistics businesses, while Garuda Aerospace has also explored delivery use cases. Pushp argued that Airbound wants to build the aircraft that other logistics networks could eventually use, rather than just trying to become the largest delivery operator. He described that as the Boeing role, meaning the aircraft that airlines everywhere rely on, not the airline itself.

Airbound designs and manufactures its aircraft in a 43,000-square-foot facility in Bengaluru, keeping work on the airframe and other core systems in-house. Pushp declined to disclose production capacity or the number of aircraft built so far, but said manufacturing would not be the bottleneck as Airbound scales. The bigger bottleneck, he noted, is regulation, particularly securing approvals for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, a certification critical to operating delivery networks at scale. These regulatory constraints have also limited Airbound’s ability to turn flights into meaningful commercial revenue. The startup remains broadly pre-revenue despite having a team of more than 150 employees. Pushp said the goal is to be a giant in a few decades, not to make revenue as soon as possible.