The Airbound drone delivery network ambitions now extend well beyond a single hospital corridor: the Bengaluru-based startup has closed a $37 million Series A and signed a formal agreement to build a three-city aerial logistics system across the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, targeting 10,000 flights a day within one year of launch.
The round was led by Greenoaks, with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures. It follows an $8.65 million seed round announced in October 2025, which Groom led alongside Humba Ventures and Lightspeed, and which also drew investment from senior leaders at Tesla, SpaceX, and Anduril. A $1.7 million earlier raise preceded even that, according to Business Standard, bringing total funding to nearly $50 million. Moneycontrol had reported in December 2025 that Airbound was set to raise $30 million; the final closed amount was $37 million.
Founded in March 2023, the company has moved fast for a hardware startup. Its core bet is structural: conventional aircraft carry more of their own weight than their payload, which makes air freight expensive. Airbound’s answer is a tail-sitter design, rocket-like in appearance, that takes off and lands vertically before pivoting to horizontal flight. Its current drone, the TRT, weighs about 3.3 pounds and carries roughly 2.2 pounds of cargo. A next-generation model under development is expected to weigh 6.6 pounds while carrying up to 11 pounds, effectively inverting the weight-to-payload ratio further.
‘We want to build towards a world where everything has cost parity with trucking,’ founder and CEO Naman Pushp said.
A Hospital Route That Made the Case
The clearest proof of concept so far is a corridor connecting Chandapura Clinic to Narayana Health City in Electronic City, Bengaluru, a route of 4 kilometres. The service, which began in January 2026, carries up to 40 diagnostic samples per flight across 10 round trips daily, according to DroneLife. Narayana Health subsequently cancelled its ground transfers on the route. The same samples would take three to five hours by road, factoring in the time spent bundling enough material to justify a truck journey. A single Airbound drone completes the 2.5-mile trip in around seven minutes.
A 54-day pilot logged more than 700 drone flights between the two sites, with Digital Health News reporting plans to extend the programme to five more Bengaluru clinics within one to two years, and further afield to Kolkata. Airbound says it has now completed more than 13,000 autonomous flights in total, across Bengaluru and Guntur, with zero failures recorded.
The next Narayana expansion is already designed in: the hospital group’s new Banashankari facility in Bengaluru was built without an on-site diagnostic lab or blood bank, deliberately specifying Airbound’s drones as the link to centralised services.
Inside the Airbound Drone Delivery Network Plan for Andhra Pradesh
The Andhra Pradesh agreement, formally named the Amaravati Capital Region Drone Delivery Network, targets the cities of Amaravati, Vijayawada, and Guntur, with operations set to begin first in Guntur, according to the New Indian Express. The memorandum of understanding was signed in New Delhi by Airbound’s Pushp and Geetanjali Sharma, Managing Director and Chairman of the Andhra Pradesh Drone Corporation (APDC), in the presence of Union Civil Aviation Minister Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu.
The agreement carries no government contract or subsidy. The state is instead working with Airbound on the regulatory framework required to enable the network, and Airbound expects to generate revenue from commercial clients, covering retail, e-commerce, and healthcare deliveries. Reaching 10,000 flights a day will require between 250 and 1,000 aircraft depending on route lengths; Pushp expects the fleet to land closer to 250.
The company designs and manufactures its aircraft in a 43,000-square-foot facility in Bengaluru, keeping the airframe and core systems in-house. Pushp declined to disclose production capacity or total units built so far, but said manufacturing would not be the limiting factor as Airbound scales. Regulation is. Specifically, approvals for beyond visual line of sight operations, which allow drones to fly outside an operator’s direct sight, remain the critical bottleneck for any commercial network of this scale.
Airbound employs more than 150 people and remains broadly pre-revenue. Pushp is candid about the timeline: ‘The goal is to be a giant in a few decades, not to make revenue as soon as we can.’ His longer-term model is not to become the dominant delivery operator but to supply the aircraft that other logistics networks use. ‘That’s the Boeing role,’ he said, ‘the aircraft airlines everywhere rely on, not the airline itself.’
The BVLOS approvals, then, are the immediate binary. Once cleared, the Andhra Pradesh network can move from agreement to operation. Until then, the one-year target for 10,000 daily flights is a countdown with a regulatory trigger at its start.
