At 16, while most teenagers were cramming for board exams, Naman Pushp was sanding carbon-fibre drone parts on his study table.
Driven by his dream to turn drone delivery into an affordable means for critical supplies, Pushp, at 20, has scaled his high-school project into Airbound, a drone-based delivery startup that has flown over 10,000 km, and raised $8.65 million. He is now focused on building drones so efficient that deliveries could one day cost just ₹1.
Drone delivery, especially in India, can feel like a far-off innovation, with the image of a sleek aircraft rising quietly over rooftops, bypassing traffic. This could extend to the most sensitive domains and deliver with more precision than any rider on a bike.
It was this driving thought that led the teenager Pushp to learn fluid mechanics through YouTube videos and MIT OpenCourseWare. And true to his ambition, Airbound has begun its flight by transporting medical supplies, before scaling up to everyday groceries and city logistics.
Going ahead, Pushp wants to make deliveries so cheap that moving blood samples between hospitals, sending medicines to remote villages, or even transporting organs could cost just ₹1.
Their drones can carry payloads of one kilogram, with the capacity set to expand to three kilograms soon. The company’s long-term aim is to redefine how goods move at scale.
“We genuinely want to create a world where roads are optional. As of today, we can offer deliveries at a lower price point than any other method that exists. We are globally the lowest cost delivery provider on a per-kilometre basis.” Pushp told AIM.
The Prime Time
By the 11th standard, Pushp had already built his first working prototypes. When he applied to gradCapital for funding, the firm didn’t have a category for teenagers designing unconventional aircraft.
gradCapital’s co-founder Abhishek Sethi still remembers the day they met the 16-year-old. “We had to call his parents before giving him the grant,” he laughed. “He’d be sanding drone parts during our interview. He went to school eight hours a day and worked another eight on his drone. That kind of obsession is rare.”
The firm gave him $25,000, which Pushp used to rent a small flat in Mumbai and build a working demo. This wasn’t a hobby. The work demonstrated technical depth, “like a PhD student,” as Sethi described during AIM’s recent visit to Airbound’s manufacturing facility.
The work was also dangerous.
“He almost burned down his flat, and one day, he fell from a roof while doing an experiment. I’m worried for his life. But he’s not joking around. He’s a serious person who has a serious project.”
gradCapital backed him before he had a company, before he finished school, and before he could legally sign the documents to register either. A few months later, that prototype caught the attention of Lightspeed India, who decided to invest after seeing the aircraft in action.
Pushp sees the timeline differently.
“This was more of a project than a company.” He said he has been working on his brand for the past five years, but the company has only really existed since 2023.
The early challenge was not convincing investors, but convincing engineers older than him to trust his intuition.
“A lot of the early days were me having to aggressively prove myself with the team by just staying at the office till like 2 a.m., building the carbon fibre part that nobody thought was possible.”
But as the aircraft designs evolved, so did the team’s respect. As Pushp said, “Engineers respect good engineers.” Airbound now has a team of 50 with drone production scaled to one drone a day and an improvement of 35x in reliability. “And this was only in the past three months. We’re so much more than a project now.”
“Each week he was learning so fast that it became clear he’d outpace most pedigreed teams,” said Sethi. “The mistake most investors make is waiting for people to go full-time before funding them. We took the opposite bet, and it paid off.”
The Carbon Cost
Most drones today either hover like quadcopters, using a lot of power to stay aloft or require runways like fixed-wing aircraft. Pushp wanted flight efficiency sans infrastructure. The result was a blended-wing-body tailsitter, a drone that can take off vertically, transition into efficient forward flight, and land anywhere.
The solution to his undertaking lay in rethinking the material from the ground up. “I never learned how to manufacture with metals.” Carbon fibre for him and his team wasn’t a replacement material; it was the starting point.
Airbound claims its carbon-fibre process is six times lighter and 2.2 times stiffer than anything comparable, a material breakthrough that directly reduces energy use. “We built from physics, not software,” Pushp said. “Every curve, every gram has a reason and we get to think about unique things that you could never, ever imagine with metals.”
Airbound is now able to manufacture many of its own components, which also shifts cost structures. Each drone now costs a fraction of what traditional manufacturing would, with prototype propellers alone coming in at five times cheaper than off-the-shelf parts, as per Airbound’s in-house carbon-fibre process. This efficiency makes every aircraft both lighter and dramatically less expensive to produce.
Pushp argues that the economics of last-mile delivery have remained largely unchanged for decades. Roads, fuel, vehicles, and delivery labour create cost floors that cannot fall much further. But air doesn’t have the same structural limits, if the aircraft is optimised.
How Automated Is It?
Drones move faster than ambulances. They bypass traffic. They are cheaper to operate continuously. This makes them suited to transporting blood samples, vaccines, or critical medicines between hospitals, something that Airbound is already piloting.
However, Pushp does not want organ delivery to be treated as an expensive, specialised service.
“I want to create a service that is so reliable that organ delivery also happens for ₹1.”
Airbound’s flights today are fully autonomous, with pilots only stepping in if something goes wrong. Their goal is not to remove humans, but rather to reduce the frequency of intervention to scale operations.
Airbound’s RUDRA control system now allows a single operator to oversee more than 100 autonomous flights (intervene for 1 in 1000 flights) at once. This automation, paired with the aircraft’s efficiency, brings down costs dramatically, from around ₹90 per km to ₹1 per km.
“It physically hurts to know what optimal looks like and go for something suboptimal,” Pushp added.
Scaling Comes with Demand
India’s major cities are dense, regulated airspaces. Pushp intends to start where drones can fly, not where they can’t. The long-term vision isn’t just to make deliveries cheaper, it’s to make location irrelevant.
“If we can give tier-2 and tier-3 cities access to the best possible logistics, the metros will follow. Everyone in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi is going to be banging at the government’s door saying, ‘we need this’.” he said.
The startup has now launched a pilot programme with Narayana Health to run 10 medical deliveries a day, transporting vaccines, samples, and emergency supplies across hospital networks.
Airbound’s $8.65 million in seed funding was led by Lachy Groom, Physical Intelligence, Humba Ventures, and Lightspeed, along with team members from Tesla, Anduril Industries, Ather Energy, and others.
“We’ve built the best drone in the world. Millions of deliveries is a great point where you can prove that this works,” Pushp said, adding that Airbound’s drone doesn’t even look like one, it’s more a plane that takes off and lands like a drone.
If they reach that stage, Pushp believes drones will no longer be a futuristic idea, but basic infrastructure, as invisible and inevitable as the internet.
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