Alteon

Alteon is building small, fixed-wing autonomous aircraft designed to stay aloft for more than a year at a time by extracting energy from wind shear over the ocean, a maneuver known as dynamic soaring. The technique is inspired by albatrosses, which repeatedly move between layers of air traveling at different speeds to fly long distances at almost no metabolic cost. The target customers sit across defense and dual-use markets that today rely on satellites or short-endurance drones for persistent maritime surveillance, communications relay, and observation, where a plane that never needs to land changes the unit economics of coverage. The launch marks a $2.5M pre-seed led by Lachy Groom with participation from Together Fund , alongside a concrete near-term goal of a flight that takes off in 2026 and lands in 2027. It follows a recent offshore test in which the team flew four aircraft in formation less than a meter above the waves to practice the dynamic soaring maneuver, a prerequisite for stitching together the loops that would sustain months-long flight. The company has not yet demonstrated that its aircraft can sustain flight purely on harvested wind energy, and local wind shear and turbulence can vary substantially, complicating continuous energy extraction. Founder Samay Sanghvi began work on the underlying tech in 2023 before incorporating the startup in 2025, developed the prototypes without a formal engineering degree, and received early backing from Emergent Ventures and 1517. The team has since grown to 20. For operators and investors watching autonomy and long-endurance platforms, the interesting question is whether Alteon can turn a biologically proven flight strategy into a repeatable industrial system before its 2026 attempt.