Today we are proud to be announcing our investment in Airbound — a deep-tech company building the world’s most advanced and aerodynamic Blended Wing Body Tailsitter drones for consumer-grade deliveries worldwide. We met the founder Naman Pushp last year — he was just 17yrs old and had already turned down a CMU admit and spent a year building a VTOL prototype that blew our minds during demos. Since our investment, Airbound has been under stealth obsessing over the design, weight, and carrying capacity of the drone. We are now thrilled to bring this company out of stealth as we gear up for commercial scale-up in 2025.
Logistics in its current form is broken.
For most of human history, forget inter-continental, even inter-city logistics was nearly unthinkable. In a more and more connected world, the logistics industry has drastically changed, with hub and spoke networks getting exponentially more efficient with scale. This scale has benefited long-distance shipping, but last-mile delivery is stuck in the 1800s, with individual drivers delivering individual packages by hand, making it disproportionately expensive. A package shipped from China to the US has to travel between 2–3 hubs in China, cross an ocean, and go between another set of 3–4 hubs in the US — but that long journey somehow costs less per kg-mile than the last 10 miles of transport to your doorstep. This problem is only getting worse. Out of the $1.02T in global food delivery revenue in 2023, roughly $500B went into the cost of delivery.
At the same time, customers are looking for faster ways to get deliveries. The 2-hr delivery segment has some of the highest potential to create brand-loyalty and is also the least served category. Today a majority of retailers lose money on the last mile to maintain customer loyalty. Logistics is an industry that lives and dies by margins. Even a 10% improvement in delivery costs would fundamentally transform the business.
What if there was a way to make the last mile effectively free? Given a majority of this last mile cost is fuel, vehicle lease, repair & maintenance, returns/cancellations due to traffic delays, and driver costs, the best way to automate this leg is via the aerial route using drones that are (a) cheap (b) durable (c) aerodynamically capable to carry greater than their own weight and (d) don’t need complex infra to integrate with delivery systems — i.e. they have VTOL & autonomous capabilities. This is the holy grail of deliveries. This is where Airbound comes in.
At Airbound, we are not just building the best drones in the world. We are building the world’s most efficient aircraft.
How can drone delivery be 100x cheaper?
Slight detour on the tech as that’s the most critical and hardest part to get right. Aerodynamic and structural efficiency are the two key levers that affect the cost of operating a drone delivery system. Drone delivery cost largely boils down to the cost of replacing batteries (~50–80%) and motors/other moving parts (20–30%).
A more aerodynamically efficient aircraft needs less battery capacity to fly the same distance, reducing overall weight. A lighter aircraft further reduces both battery requirements and motor replacement costs. While these changes seem linear, they compound heavily and enable usage of more efficient technologies.
At Airbound over the last 2 years, we have innovated heavily on two ares of cutting edge drone research: (1) we’ve built one of the lightest flight-ready materials in the world fit for daily drone deliveries. Our obsession with making the world’s most lightweight material led us to design an entirely new way to fabricate, manufacture, and heat-treat the carbon-fiber based material that goes into our drones. They are so light that you can drop it along with a piece of A4 paper and they’ll fall to the floor about the same. And (2) we’ve built the world’s best strength-to-weight material. The current best structures (carbon-honeycomb sandwich panels) are able to withstand a 70kg flexural load with just 300g of structure. We did it with 22g. This is a 13x improvement over any other structural material at this scale.
Our drones compress over 8kgs of structural weight into less than 250 grams, while maintaining the same strength. This is what it takes to build an Airbound drone.
For the aerospace enthusiasts reading this, our aerodynamic efficiency comes from combining the efficiency of a Blended Wing Body design with the flight path of a tail-sitter. By rotating the frame in midair, we’re able to achieve the first ever zero compromises VTOL. We are currently at an L/D ratio of 12, and in the next iteration will be able to reach L/D=20 by mid-2025. Our structural weight % (what percentage of the Maximum Takeoff Weight is structures) is currently 10% and will come down to 6% by late-2025.
What this lets us achieve, is a drone that’s better than the competition in every single meaningful metric. These specifications are from drones Airbound has built and flown on a daily basis. Today, Airbound can reduce the cost of last-mile delivery to less than a dollar. In 3 years, no last-mile delivery would cost more than a nickel.
Airbound drones fly at a speed of 60km/hr, don’t have to deal with traffic, and can get up to cruise speed in less than 5 seconds. Nobody would ever need to wait more than 15 minutes for delivery. With a lightweight build and high aerodynamic efficiency, Airbound is the quietest delivery drone in the world. As soon as the drone enters cruise, it’s no longer physically possible to hear the aircraft, meaning that unless you’re the one receiving the delivery, there’s no way you can hear an Airbound drone. And even if you’re standing directly underneath our drone, the noise is about as loud as a soft conversation (60db).
We want to build the best last-mile delivery experience physically possible. It’s a long road — no pun intended — but we are really excited by how far Airbound has come in just a year. As we finally come out of stealth, it gives us great pleasure to also welcome our co-investors GradCapital, Draper and Peter Thiel backed 1517 fund, & Emergent Ventures, together with founders and operators at Pixxel and Boom Supersonic. We are hiring engineers and drone-nerds across India & US.
— Hemant Mohapatra, Prateek Raj — Lightspeed. Technical contributions from Naman Pushp, CEO of Airbound
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