Airbound raises $37 million to scale cargo drones

A diagnostic sample leaves the road and takes to the air on a Narayana Health route in India, covering about 2.5 miles in around seven minutes. The same journey can take three to five hours by truck, partly because samples wait to be bundled for road transport. Airbound, the Bengaluru startup operating the route, has raised $37 million to push its autonomous cargo drones beyond this early network.

The aircraft is built around a tail-sitter design: it takes off and lands vertically while upright, then shifts into horizontal flight. Airbound’s current TRT drone weighs about 3.3 pounds and carries around 2.2 pounds of payload. A model under development is expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds and carry up to 11 pounds. The company says keeping vertical takeoff and landing will avoid dependence on runways as the aircraft grow.

Airbound has completed more than 13,000 autonomous flights across Bengaluru and Guntur, including more than 1,000 flights for Narayana Health. That partnership is expanding to Banashankari hospital in Bengaluru, which was designed without an on-site diagnostic lab or blood bank and will rely on drones to connect with centralized facilities. Airbound is also working with the Andhra Pradesh government on a network linking three cities, with an eventual target of 10,000 flights a day.

And then, concretely? The near-term gain is time for healthcare facilities moving diagnostic samples: minutes in the air instead of hours on the road. For logistics companies, Airbound is positioning its aircraft as equipment that other delivery networks could use, rather than trying to become the biggest operator itself. Reaching that scale would require between 250 and 1,000 aircraft, depending on route lengths, according to founder and CEO Naman Pushp.

The gap between a useful route and a large commercial network remains substantial. Airbound is broadly pre-revenue despite having more than 150 employees, and the company has not disclosed how many aircraft it has built or its production capacity. The larger bottleneck is approval for beyond visual line of sight, or BVLOS, operations—flights beyond the direct sight of an operator—which are critical for delivery networks to operate at scale.