Airbound

Airbound is a Bengaluru, India-based dronetech startup building autonomous cargo aircraft aimed at making air delivery cost-competitive with road transport. Its current drone, called TRT, weighs about 3.3 pounds and can carry around 2.2 pounds of payload, with a next version under development expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds and carry up to 11 pounds. The design is a rocket-like tail-sitter that launches and lands vertically in an upright position, then transitions to horizontal flight , and the aircraft can travel up to 40 kilometres on a single charge at a cruise speed of around 60 kilometres per hour with a 1.4-metre wingspan . This launch marks Airbound's $37 million Series A led by Greenoaks, taking total funding to nearly $50 million, with proceeds going toward engineering, commercialization, and go-to-market . The round, led by Greenoaks with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures, comes less than a year after Airbound raised an $8.65 million seed round. The pitch to operators is straightforward on unit economics: electric two-wheelers used in India to deliver payloads under 3 kilograms themselves weigh around 150 kilograms and cost about ₹2 per kilometer in energy, and Airbound aims to cut that to as low as 10 paise by using a drone built specifically for small payloads that removes the human driver, reducing total transport weight by roughly 30 times . Airbound was founded in 2020 by Naman Pushp, who was 15 at the time and is now 20 , and Lightspeed's team first met him at 17, after he had turned down a CMU admit and spent a year building a VTOL prototype . Founder Pushp has framed the company's ambition beyond parcel delivery, arguing that the underlying carbon fibre technology can be applied more broadly , with the company already developing lightweight autonomous aircraft designed to transport people and goods, and claiming its aircraft can carry a single passenger or around 100 kg in larger configurations. The Series A is the moment Airbound moves from stealth-era demos and a hospital delivery pilot into scaled manufacturing of the TRT platform.