Bengaluru-based Airbound has raised $37 million in Series A funding, founder and chief executive Naman Pushp announced on X on August 25. Greenoaks led the round, with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures.

The raise comes less than a year after an $8.65 million seed and takes total capital to about $50 million. Pushp said Airbound will use the money to accelerate engineering, commercial-scale manufacturing, and go-to-market work. The company was founded in 2023 and designs its aircraft in-house at a 43,000-square-foot facility in Bengaluru.

Pushp's thesis is that conventional aircraft spend too much energy carrying their own weight. Airbound builds tail-sitter drones that take off and land vertically, then transition to horizontal flight. In an interview with TechCrunch, he said the current aircraft, called TRT, weighs about 3.3 pounds and carries about 2.2 pounds. A larger version in development is expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds and carry up to 11 pounds. The company intends to keep vertical takeoff on later models so the aircraft do not need runways.

Airbound said it has completed more than 13,000 autonomous flights in Bengaluru and Guntur. More than 1,000 of those flights have been for hospital network Narayana Health, moving diagnostic samples about 2.5 miles in seven minutes. Pushp told TechCrunch the same trip takes three to five hours by truck. The hospital work is still a thin operation: one active drone on that route, with plans to add a new Bengaluru hospital that lacks an on-site lab.

Separately, Airbound signed an agreement with the government of Andhra Pradesh to help stand up a three-city drone delivery network. The long-term target is 10,000 flights a day across retail, e-commerce, and healthcare. Pushp said the state is helping with the regulatory framework rather than writing a large purchase contract or subsidy.

Alongside the funding post, Pushp published a company manifesto arguing that flight should become the default way people and goods move. That is a long-range claim. Payloads are still small, the company remains early on revenue, and beyond-visual-line-of-sight approvals are a bottleneck. The Series A is a bet that lighter airframes can close the cost gap with trucks before Airbound has to become an airline itself.