Airbound, a Bengaluru-based aerospace startup, has raised $37 million in a Series A round led by Greenoaks, with participation from DoorDash, angel investor Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures, the company confirmed on August 25. The round takes Airbound’s total funding to nearly $50 million since it was founded in 2023, and follows an $8.65 million seed round led by Groom less than a year earlier. No valuation was disclosed.
Founded by Naman Pushp, who began building drones at age 15, Airbound designs vertical-take-off “tail-sitter” aircraft engineered to weigh less than the cargo they carry — a ratio the company says runs roughly three times better than the industry norm of 4:1. Its current aircraft, TRT, weighs about 1.5 kg and carries roughly 1 kg; a next-generation model is designed to weigh about 2.99 kg and carry up to 4.9 kg. The company positions itself as an aircraft manufacturer rather than a delivery operator, designing and building in a 43,000 sq ft Bengaluru facility and selling the hardware to logistics operators.
Airbound says it has completed more than 13,000 autonomous flights across Bengaluru and Guntur, including over 1,000 with the Narayana Health hospital network flying diagnostic samples between facilities. It has also signed a commercial deployment agreement with the Andhra Pradesh government to build an aerial network across Amaravati, Vijayawada and Guntur, with a stated target of 10,000 daily flights across retail, e-commerce and healthcare. Production has scaled from two aircraft a month to two a day over the past year, with a near-term target of 20 a day, according to the company.
The gap between that pitch and proof remains wide. Airbound’s flagship healthcare deployment still runs largely on a single route, and the 10,000-daily-flight target in Andhra Pradesh depends on manufacturing scale, airspace management and, above all, regulatory approval for beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) flight that India is still building a framework for. DoorDash’s participation in a hardware-heavy Series A suggests last-mile logistics players are hedging against ground-delivery economics plateauing — but until BVLOS clearance catches up with the aircraft, Airbound’s cost-parity claim stays a claim rather than a demonstrated unit economic.
