‘Roads are non-compulsory’: Airbound founder on taking drone deliveries mainstream with Narayana Well being
Bengaluru-based autonomous logistics start-up Airbound is eyeing the skies to remodel how India thinks about supply. Contemporary off an $8.65-million seed funding spherical, the corporate has partnered with Narayana Well being to pilot medical drone deliveries—marking its first industrial engagement and a high-stakes check for its formidable know-how.
The funding spherical, led by Lachy Groom, co-founder of Bodily Intelligence, additionally noticed participation from Humba Ventures, Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, and senior leaders from Tesla, Anduril, and Ather Power. The three-month pilot with Narayana Well being will see Airbound drones make 10 each day deliveries of blood samples, check kits, and important medical provides, validating their reliability.
Based in 2023 by Naman Pushp, Airbound’s imaginative and prescient goes past fast commerce or incremental innovation. “We’re not pondering one or two years forward,” Pushp advised Enterprise In the present day. “We’re taking a look at what ensures we’re dominating 10, 20 years out into the longer term.”
Airbound’s engineering-first philosophy is what units it aside in India’s rising drone ecosystem. Its drones are constructed in-house from carbon fibre and have a blended-wing-body “tailsitter” design, which mixes the vertical elevate of helicopters with the aerodynamic effectivity of airplanes. This enables them to hold 1 kg payloads over 37 km, a efficiency edge achieved by means of first-principles design reasonably than iterations on current fashions.
For Airbound, this long-term strategy has been essential in attracting strategic companions. Pushp says Dr Devi Shetty, Founder and Chairman of Narayana Well being, shares an identical imaginative and prescient of sustainable innovation. “Dr. Shetty sees how this could reshape healthcare logistics not simply right this moment however 20 years down the road.”
Dr. Shetty, in flip, sees drones as the subsequent leap in medical effectivity. “Our partnership with Airbound permits us to pilot a promising know-how that might considerably enhance the pace and reliability of medical deliveries,” he mentioned in a press word, including that such innovation may make life-saving variations in underserved areas.
The recent capital will primarily go into scaling manufacturing and constructing a fleet of supply drones. Whereas Airbound stays pre-revenue, its roadmap is to cut back supply prices so drastically that distance turns into irrelevant. “We need to make supply as ubiquitous as a motorcycle,” Pushp mentioned.
With round $10 million raised up to now, Airbound plans to develop past healthcare into broader logistics by 2026. If its pilot with Narayana Well being proves profitable, the corporate may nicely be scripting the early chapters of India’s aerial logistics revolution—one the place, as Pushp places it, “roads are non-compulsory.”
