When will your favourite food company start delivering your order by drone? For years, we have been hearing predictions that autonomous aircraft will revolutionise the last-mile delivery space, with drones dropping off all your orders in a matter of minutes, but so far at least, progress has been slow in most markets worldwide. However, Airbound, a small Indian start-up, hopes to speed things up.
The Bangalore-based business, which is today announcing a $1.7 million seed funding round, is run by founder and CEO Naman Pushp, a young entrepreneur who started working on designs for drones at high school before launching the company in 2020. “We’ve seen a huge number of drone delivery companies but very often their model hasn’t worked,” Pushp says. “We’re trying to do things a little differently.”
What’s held the industry back so far, Pushp believes, has been the economics of drone delivery. Drones might help businesses deliver customers a little more quickly, but industries such as food retail, supermarkets and logistics aren’t going to embrace the technology unless it also offers attractive cost savings. Most of the drones designed to date, he explains, haven’t really delivered that.
The problem is that drones have to be relatively heavy to carry the loads expected of them; they’re not especially energy efficient and batteries have to be replaced regularly at high cost. Airbound has therefore focused on design; Pushp sees the company’s competitive advantage as the aerodynamic and weight superiority of his drones. Airbound drones are three times lighter than conventional alternatives and four times’ more energy efficient. The result is they are significantly cheaper to manufacture and to operate – creating a much more viable business model for adoption in the delivery space.
“We scrutinised every vehicle system to reduce weight, enhance safety and reliability, and to maximise efficiency; we developed new methods to manufacture carbon fibre that allow us to reduce the weight of our to 400 grams,” explains Pushp. “Our goal isn’t just to build a great drone – we want to create a world where delivery is essentially free.”
Having spent the past few years perfecting the design, Airbound is now ready to begin commercialising its drones. It has already agreed contracts in India to make medical deliveries, such as dropping supplies at clinics and testing labs, and transporting blood samples. By next year, Pushp expects to be making 200 deliveries a day.
Critically, this will give the company a track record of flight hours, enabling it prove its drones are safe. This is what is required by regulators in Western markets, including the Federal Aviation Authority in the US, before they will allow a drone company to offer commercial flights. Airbound’s initial work in the medical space will therefore both prove its business model and support its move into consumer-facing markets in countries such as the US.
Airbound isn’t the only drone developer pursuing this course. Industry leaders such as Zipline are also working towards scale and mass adoption in this way – in Zipline’s case, many of its early flight hours are being racked up in Africa. Wing, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, is also working with medical companies.
However, Pushp believes the company’s designs give it an edge. “We’ve genuinely pushed the frontiers of aerospace forward,” he says of Airbound’s drones. “We’ve made a drone that weighs less and is stronger than anyone else.”
Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed, the venture firm that is leading today’s seed round, is convinced that this small Indian start-up has a major role to play in the global marketplace.
“Drones are the future of deliveries and we are highly optimistic about the potential of this game-changing technology in revolutionising logistics,” Mohapatra says. “We are incredibly excited to partner with Naman, confident that his innovation will redefine delivery logistics.”
Lightspeed’s funding takes Airbound to the point where it can launch commercial services with Indian healthcare companies, but Pushp has already begun talking to large players in other sectors about bigger deals. That would likely see Airbound return to the funding market for additional finance next year.
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