Airbound raises $37 million in Series A round from Greenoaks

Airbound, a Bengaluru-based autonomous logistics and delivery drone startup, has raised $37 million in a Series A round led by Greenoaks, as investors put more capital behind deeptech companies with proprietary technology. DoorDash, Physical Intelligence founder Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures also participated, the company announced on Tuesday.

The funding will help Airbound scale engineering, commercial manufacturing and go-to-market efforts, taking its total fundraise to nearly $50 million. The startup had raised $8.65 million in a seed round led by Groom in October last year, with participation from Lightspeed and Humba Ventures.

"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,” said company founder and chief executive Naman Pushp in a statement.

Airbound’s fundraise comes as India’s venture capital and startup ecosystem increasingly backs companies with strong intellectual property. Deeptech has attracted more capital even as deal volumes have fallen, suggesting investors are becoming more selective.

The sector has raised $2.2 billion across 187 deals so far in 2026, compared with $1.6 billion across 487 deals in 2025, according to startup intelligence platform Tracxn.

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

From pilots to commercial deployment

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

“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,” said Pushp in the statement. “If you can build something that works in India, it tends to work anywhere.”

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

Built around the payload

Airbound builds autonomous aircraft designed to weigh less than the cargo they carry, departing from conventional aircraft designs. A purpose-built vehicle carrying a single passenger or roughly 100kg of cargo typically weighs around 400kg once fuel and payload are factored in, according to the company. 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 the round through its DoorDash Labs unit, described the investment as a bet on broader advances in autonomous delivery.

"We're excited about the bold new approaches emerging in autonomous delivery, and we love backing teams tackling hard problems," said Harrison Shih, Head of Product for DoorDash Labs. “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.”