Airbound Raises $37M Led by Greenoaks for Drone Delivery

Airbound, a Bengaluru-based autonomous logistics and delivery drone startup, raised $37 million in a Series A round led by Greenoaks. DoorDash Labs, Physical Intelligence founder Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures also participated, Airbound said Tuesday.

The round brings Airbound's total funding to nearly $50 million. The startup raised $8.65 million in a seed round led by Groom in October last year. Lightspeed and Humba Ventures also joined that round. The new money will help Airbound scale engineering and commercial manufacturing, and expand go-to-market work.

Founder and chief executive Naman Pushp said the company is building aircraft from first principles. "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."

Tracxn data show Indian deeptech startups raised $2.2 billion across 187 deals so far in 2026, compared with $1.6 billion across 487 deals in 2025. That works out to an average round of about $11.8 million this year, against roughly $3.3 million a year earlier.

Neil Shah, partner at Greenoaks, said: "Moving goods has always forced a choice between fast and cheap. 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."

Airbound has signed a commercial deployment agreement with Andhra Pradesh to build a drone delivery network across three cities. The network is aimed at faster, low-cost transport. It plans to eventually run 10,000 daily flights across retail and e-commerce deliveries, with healthcare as another lane.

Airbound ran a pilot from January to March with Narayana Health, moving medical and diagnostic samples between the hospital group's clinic in Bengaluru's Banashankari and its central laboratory in Electronic City. The pilot completed more than 1,000 flights with zero failures, Airbound said.

Airbound designs aircraft that weigh less than the cargo they carry, a departure from conventional aircraft designs. A conventional purpose-built vehicle carrying a single passenger or roughly 100kg of cargo typically weighs around 400kg once fuel and payload are factored in, Airbound said. Airbound says its approach reverses that ratio, so most of the weight in flight is the payload rather than the aircraft itself.

DoorDash, which joined through its DoorDash Labs unit, described the investment as a bet on broader advances in autonomous delivery. Harrison Shih, head of product for DoorDash Labs, said the firm was drawn to Airbound's first-principles approach. "We're excited about the bold new approaches emerging in autonomous delivery, and we love backing teams tackling hard problems. What drew us to Airbound is their willingness to go back to first principles and take on the physics and cost constraints that are keeping aerial delivery from being ubiquitous."

Pushp said 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. If you can build something that works in India, it tends to work anywhere."