Drone startup Airbound raises $37 million to take quick commerce to the skies, and eventually move people

Drone startup Airbound raises $37 million to take quick commerce to the skies, and eventually move people

Airbound has spent the past year proving that drones can move critical medical supplies faster than conventional ground transport.

Now, the Bengaluru-based aerospace startup wants to take that technology into a much bigger market. The company is looking at quick commerce, e-commerce and food delivery as its next areas of expansion, even as it works on a more ambitious goal, building progressively larger aircraft that can eventually carry people.

The move comes as Airbound on August 25 announced a $37 million Series A led by Greenoaks, with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures.

Moneycontrol reported the developments first in December of 2025 that Airbound is set to raise $30 million in fresh funding led by Greenoaks.

The funding takes the company's total capital raised since its 2023 launch to nearly $50 million. Airbound said the money will go towards engineering, commercial-scale manufacturing and go-to-market efforts.

In an interaction with Moneycontrol, founder and CEO Naman Pushp said a significant portion of the fresh capital will go towards increasing production capacity, expanding commercial partnerships and developing larger aircraft capable of carrying heavier payloads.

“We're basically building a template for better aircraft,” Pushp said.

Founded in 2023 by 20-year-old Naman Pushp, who first began working on drones at age 15, Airbound is building autonomous logistics aircraft based on a blended-wing-body, tail-sitter design.

Unlike conventional quadcopters, its drones take off vertically and then transition to forward flight, combining the agility of a rocket launch with the efficiency of fixed-wing cruising.

Built using carbon fibre, the aircraft are lightweight and highly energy-efficient, and Airbound manufactures key components such as propellers in-house to control costs.

From medical deliveries to quick commerce

Airbound's commercial journey so far has been rooted in healthcare. The company has completed more than 13,000 flights, including more than 1,000 with Narayana Health and more than 1,000 in Andhra Pradesh, according to Pushp.

The Narayana Health deployments have involved transporting diagnostic samples between healthcare facilities. Airbound has used these operations to demonstrate that autonomous aircraft can provide a faster alternative to road-based logistics.

Now, the startup wants to take those learnings into consumer-facing logistics.

“Quick commerce is one of the sectors that we are targeting,” Pushp said, pointing to the potential synergies between drone delivery and businesses built around speed.

The company is also looking at e-commerce and food delivery. Pushp said early examples of such payload movement could be expected sometime next year, although he cautioned that it was difficult to give concrete timelines.

Andhra Pradesh becomes the test bed

Airbound's immediate focus is Andhra Pradesh, where it has signed an agreement with the state government to establish a drone delivery network connecting Guntur, Vijayawada and Amaravati.

Pushp described the agreement as a policy framework that allows Airbound to operate across the three cities and build a network that can eventually serve a wider set of customers.

The company has already seen interest from corporate partners in the state, although Pushp declined to name them.

“We've gotten a good number of corporate partners that are really excited to build in Andhra Pradesh and use our technology to enhance their operations,” he said.

Airbound has previously outlined plans to scale the network to 10,000 daily flights. But Pushp stressed that the company does not want its economics to depend on government subsidies.

“Technology can only really prove its worth when the private sector adopts it,” he said.

The goal, he added, is to demonstrate that drone delivery can be commercially viable without incentives, before taking the model to other parts of India and eventually international markets.

The next challenge for Airbound is not simply putting more drones in the sky. It is making the aircraft bigger.

Pushp said the fresh capital will support R&D aimed at validating larger models that can carry heavier payloads. The company's approach is to perfect its aircraft at a smaller scale and then use that technology as a template for progressively larger platforms.

The underlying logic, he said, is that several core measures of aircraft performance remain broadly consistent across scales—including payload-to-weight ratio, battery and structural weight, propulsion and flight efficiency.

“So, while, yes, it might be a bit of a longer journey to get to larger-scale systems, it then ensures that when we are at that scale, we have built a system that is far better, far beyond anything that exists,” Pushp said.

That larger aircraft programme is ultimately aimed at something far more ambitious than moving packages.

Airbound wants to develop aircraft capable of moving around 100 kg of payload efficiently from one point to another. It plans to use cargo operations to build safety and reliability before seeking approvals to carry passengers.

“We intend to use that vehicle throughout our safety, our reliability by moving cargo and then get the approvals to move people as well,” Pushp said.

He believes the company could reach aircraft at the scale of moving people by the end of the decade, although certification requirements could affect the timeline.

“From a physics perspective, it's all the same,” Pushp said, arguing that once the aircraft can efficiently and safely carry a 100-kg payload, the nature of that payload becomes less relevant from an engineering standpoint.

Airbound's ambition also extends well beyond India. Pushp said the company has received interest from markets globally, with DoorDash's participation in the funding round underscoring the international potential of its technology.

“We're not interested in building the best product in India, we're interested in building the best product in the world,” he said.

For now, however, Airbound is concentrating on India—scaling manufacturing, expanding drone deliveries into commerce and developing larger aircraft.

Its Bengaluru facility houses its office, manufacturing operations and R&D lab under one roof. The company believes that proving the economics of autonomous aircraft on the ground today could be the first step towards making air mobility a mainstream form of transport tomorrow.

“We believe in a world where all movement will happen in the air,” Pushp said.

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