Airbound Raises $37M Series A Scale Flight

Airbound, the aerospace company based in Bengaluru, India, announced a $37 million Series A round led by Greenoaks and a new commercial deployment agreement with the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The funding will accelerate the commercial expansion of Airbound’s next-generation aircraft.

A New Class of Aircraft

Transport aircraft have changed little in design for centuries, yet Airbound’s approach is different. By combining advances in autonomy, materials science and a physics-first mindset, the company has created a new class of transport aircraft that weigh less than the matter they move. A typical single-passenger or 100 kg cargo flight requires a purpose-built aircraft that weighs about 400 kg when fuel and payload are included. Most of that weight is spent lifting the aircraft itself, not the payload. Airbound flips that equation so that most of the weight in flight is the payload being transported.

Naman Pushp, Founder and CEO of Airbound, said, “We believe in a world where all movement happens in the air. Not some of it. Not most of it. All of it. A world where flying is cheaper than taking the bus, where moving a single package costs less than moving 20 tons by truck, and where we look at cars the way we look at horses today.”

Neil Shah, Partner at Greenoaks, added, “Moving goods has always forced a choice between fast and cheap. Trucks are cheap and slow, planes are fast and expensive, and nothing has broken the trade-off in more than a century. Airbound does. When one autonomous aircraft can move a single package with the cost efficiency of a fully loaded 20-ton truck, fast delivery and cheap delivery are no longer in tension, and roads stop being the default.”

Commercial Momentum

Airbound’s aircraft are designed, manufactured and deployed in India, where they have been tested in one of the world’s most demanding operating environments. The company has already completed more than 1,000 autonomous flights with zero mission failures in partnership with Narayana Health, one of India’s largest hospital networks, transporting diagnostic samples between healthcare facilities and reducing delivery times from hours to minutes.

Under its latest agreement with Andhra Pradesh, Airbound will build a drone delivery network to connect three cities and enable faster, lower-cost transport. The company will scale up to 10,000 daily flights, supporting retail, e-commerce and healthcare deliveries across the region. The program will serve as the playbook for aerial deliveries nationwide. Airbound’s progress in India, one of the world’s most demanding operating environments, shows what passionate engineering can do, and we’re eager to see what they build stats.

“We’re excited about the bold new approaches emerging in autonomous delivery, and we love backing teams tackling hard problems,” said Harrison Shih, Head of Product for DoorDash Labs. “What drew us to Airbound is their willingness to go back to first principles and take on the physics and cost constraints that are keeping aerial delivery from being ubiquitous. Their progress in India, one of the world’s most demanding operating environments, shows what passionate engineering can do, and we’re eager to see what they build.”

The same physics that moves a diagnostic sample between two hospitals will move freight and, in time, move people between cities, turning a 300-kilometre journey into a 20-minute flight. As the internet made distance irrelevant for information, Airbound intends to do the same for physical matter.