India’s Airbound Secures $8.65M Seed to Pioneer One-Cent Drone Delivery with Rocket-Like, Blended-Wing Aircraft
Airbound’s $8.65M Seed Funding Targets Ultra-Low-Cost Drone Delivery in India
Airbound, a burgeoning Indian drone startup, has successfully closed an $8.65 million seed funding round. This capital infusion was led by Lachy Groom, co-founder of Physical Intelligence, as the company aggressively moves toward its revolutionary goal of achieving one-cent delivery using its uniquely designed, ultra-light aircraft.
The seed funding round saw participation from Humba Ventures and key existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. High-profile individuals from the aerospace and tech industries also contributed, including senior leaders from Tesla, SpaceX, and Anduril, signaling strong confidence in Airbound’s technological approach.
Founded in 2020 by Naman Pushp—who was only 15 at the time and is now the 20-year-old CEO—Airbound has engineered an aircraft that completely rethinks the drone paradigm. Their proprietary design features a tail-sitter configuration, allowing the drone to sit vertically, launch upright like a rocket, and then transition to fly like a conventional plane. The carbon fiber frame and blended-wing-body shape with just two propellers are critical to its efficiency, starkly contrasting with the common, less aerodynamic quadcopter design.
This design enables the aircraft, known as the TRT, to deliver small parcels at up to 20 times lower cost than traditional logistics methods and significantly cheaper than current drone delivery systems. As founder and CEO Pushp explained, the target of one-cent deliveries is based on fundamentally rethinking the physics and energy cost of moving goods.
In India, typical electric two-wheelers, which weigh about 150 kilograms (331 pounds), are used to deliver payloads under 3 kilograms at an energy cost of roughly $0.02 per kilometer. Airbound aims to slash this energy cost to as low as 10 paise (around $0.001) per kilometer. The TRT drone is custom-built for small payloads and eliminates the need for a heavy human driver and vehicle, reducing the total transport weight by roughly 30 times. This, Pushp noted, translates directly into a 20-fold drop in energy cost per kilometer, making their one-cent drone delivery a feasible and scalable end state.
Pushp highlighted the massive inefficiency in current drone technology, stating, “You need four kilograms of drone to lift one kilogram of payload, which is insane to me. Range is a broken metric. There’s no concept of aerodynamic efficiency with drones [right now].”
The aircraft’s rocket-like vertical takeoff combined with its aerodynamically efficient blended-wing design eliminates the need for extra propellers and heavy, complex moving parts. By ensuring the propellers do not disrupt the airflow over the wing, the drone maintains a significantly higher lift-to-drag ratio. This dramatically reduces the amount of thrust required for flight, making forward movement far more energy-efficient than conventional multi-rotor drones.
The first production version of the drone weighs just 3.3 pounds and can carry a payload of up to 2.2 pounds. The startup’s ambitious next version aims to support a 6.6-pound payload while incredibly reducing the drone’s own weight to just 2.6 pounds. A prototype for this second version is expected to fly by mid-next year, with full production slated for the first quarter of 2027.
“When you get into the world of autonomy, logistics is just a physics problem. It’s a game of efficiency and weight. And so if you have a lower weight than anyone else and a higher efficiency than others, you win,” Pushp asserted. The company also employs lithium-ion batteries over the less durable lithium-polymer type to minimize the major operating cost of battery replacement.
The drone currently costs Airbound about $2,000 to manufacture and approximately $0.27 per delivery. The goal is to cut this per-delivery cost to below $0.05 by the end of 2026.
To date, Airbound has secured over $10 million in total funding and maintains a team of 50 people. The latest round will directly support scaling up their Bengaluru manufacturing capabilities from one drone per day to over 100 drones per day.
The company has already launched its inaugural three-month pilot program with Bengaluru’s Narayana Health to deliver medical logistics, including blood samples and critical supplies, aiming for ten deliveries daily. Airbound’s broader vision targets other high-volume sectors such as quick commerce, food deliveries, and eventually, expansion beyond India to the U.S. market in three years.
What do you think of Airbound’s aerodynamic approach to solving the drone delivery cost problem? Could this one-cent delivery model revolutionize global logistics? Leave a comment below and/or share this news on your social media to inform more people about the hottest things in aerospace, logistics, and Indian tech innovation!
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