Airbound has raised $37 million to scale its autonomous drone delivery network, backed by a new Andhra Pradesh deployment deal.
The big question for aerial delivery pilots has always been whether the underlying aircraft economics can compete with a truck on cost and a plane on speed in the same shipment. Airbound’s pitch to investors and to the Andhra Pradesh government is that it can.
Transport aircraft have changed little in basic architecture over time, according to Airbound. A purpose-built aircraft carrying a single passenger or around 100kg of cargo typically weighs about 400kg once fuel and payload are counted. Most of that weight lifts the aircraft itself, not the cargo. Airbound says its aircraft are designed to invert that ratio, so the payload accounts for most of the weight in flight.
The company describes its approach as combining advances in autonomy and materials science with what it calls physics-first design. Airbound’s argument is that an aircraft built to weigh less than the matter it carries changes the cost of moving cargo over any distance, whether that is a diagnostic sample crossing a city or a package crossing a state.
Greenoaks led the $37 million round with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures. Airbound has raised close to $50 million since it launched in 2023. The company said the funding will go toward engineering, commercial-scale manufacturing, and go-to-market work.
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.
“Better physics leads to better economics, which unlocks the potential to move people and goods for a fraction of a cent. That is what we’re building at Airbound.”
Neil Shah, a partner at Greenoaks, added: “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. We are proud to partner with Airbound on this journey.”
The company reports completing more than 1,000 autonomous flights with zero mission failures in a partnership with Narayana Health, one of India’s largest hospital networks. The aircraft carry diagnostic samples between healthcare facilities, cutting delivery times that once took hours down to minutes.
Andhra Pradesh deal targets 10,000 daily autonomous drone delivery flights
Under the new agreement, Airbound will build a drone delivery network connecting three cities in Andhra Pradesh. The company plans to scale to 10,000 daily flights, supporting retail, e-commerce, and healthcare deliveries across the state. Airbound and the state government intend the programme to work as a model for aerial delivery elsewhere in India.
“The bar for delivery in India is high. The benchmark is 10 minutes to your doorstep, at an extremely low cost. That’s the complexity here,” Pushp added. “If you can build something that works in India, it tends to work anywhere.”
DoorDash joined the round through its DoorDash Labs division. According to Harrison Shih, head of product for DoorDash Labs, the company’s willingness to “go back to first principles and take on the physics and cost constraints that are keeping aerial delivery from being ubiquitous” is what drew the division’s interest.
Shih pointed to Airbound’s progress in India as evidence of what the engineering approach can produce, supporting Pushp’s claim that the country is one of the most demanding operating environments for the technology.
DoorDash’s involvement links a food and goods delivery platform directly to an aircraft manufacturer’s cap table, rather than to a software or fleet-management partnership layered on top of someone else’s hardware. The structure gives DoorDash Labs early visibility into aircraft-level cost data as Airbound scales past healthcare logistics into retail and e-commerce delivery under the Andhra Pradesh contract.
Airbound says the same physics that moves a diagnostic sample between two hospitals will eventually move freight, and in time, people between cities. The company describes a future in which a 300-kilometre journey becomes a 20-minute flight, and it draws a comparison to how the internet removed distance as a constraint for information. None of that is operational yet.
What is operational, on the company’s own figures, is the Narayana Health sample network and the flight count behind it. What is contracted, but not yet built, is the Andhra Pradesh network, which is set to connect three cities and run at up to 10,000 daily flights carrying retail, e-commerce, and healthcare traffic once deployed.
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