A 15-year-old locked inside his house during the 2020 pandemic turned boredom into a $50 million drone business. Naman Pushp, now 21, leads Airbound, a Bengaluru aerospace startup that just landed a $37 million Series A round from Greenoaks.
The cash infusion pushes the company’s total fundraising close to $50 million. That trajectory started back in 2020, when school closures left Pushp stuck at home with nothing to do but tinker.
He had spent part of his childhood in Malaysia, building simple robots since Classes 5 and 6. During lockdown, he started experimenting with drone construction and entered the result, which he called Open Drone, into a hackathon. The prototype won $500. He reinvested every rupee into building a more serious version.
That first serious drone still decorates the wall of Airbound’s office.
Pushp secured his first venture cheque at age 16 from GradCapital while still in school. The deal created an odd snag: because he was a minor, investors needed his father’s signature before finalizing anything. Later, Carnegie Mellon University accepted him, but he walked away from that opportunity.
The driving reason: conventional aircraft waste enormous energy hauling their own weight. Payload becomes an afterthought, which makes drone delivery unable to compete with trucks on price. Airbound flips that equation.
Its current TRT aircraft weighs roughly 1.5 kg while carrying about 1 kg of cargo. The machine lifts vertically, then transitions to horizontal flight. A larger model targeting 5 kg payloads sits in development.
Airbound has already completed over 13,000 autonomous flights across Bengaluru and Guntur. More than 1,000 of those served Narayana Health, which now depends on the drones to shuttle blood samples between clinic and hospital. The health system’s new Banashankari hospital opened without a diagnostic lab specifically because Airbound handles the transport.
That route alone sees up to 20 flights daily. Meanwhile, the startup plans a network connecting Amaravati, Vijayawada, and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, aiming eventually for 10,000 flights per day. The state government is building ground observer infrastructure so private operators can fly within visual line of sight.
Pushp’s next hurdle sits in manufacturing. Airbound bets on lightweight carbon fibre aircraft built at scale. “100 aircraft a day will start to feel very tiny,” he said at a recent event.
