India’s Airbound bags $37M to take on trucks with rocket-like drones

Подробности

Airbound , an Indian startup building autonomous drones, has raised $37 million in fresh capital as it pushes to make moving goods through the air as cheap as trucking them by road.

The Series A 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 . With this funding, the three-year-old startup has raised nearly $50 million.

Airbound, and other startups in this nascent sector, argue that drones can move certain goods faster and cheaper than vehicles on the road. And while there have been successful deployments, drone delivery is still far from matching the scale and versatility of trucking.

Airbound is trying to close that gap by redesigning the aircraft to make it more competitive with ground transportation.

Conventional aircraft spend a lot of energy carrying their own weight rather than the payload, making flight expensive, particularly for moving smaller loads. Airbound’s answer is to build vertical-flight drones designed to weigh less than the cargo they carry, founder and CEO Naman Pushp said in an interview.