Airbound raises $37M to make drone delivery as cheap as trucking
Two infrastructure stories today — one financial, one silicon: an Indian drone startup just banked $37 million to undercut trucking, and RISC-V finally got a server you can stop thinking about.
Airbound, a Bengaluru startup building autonomous delivery drones, has raised $37 million in Series A funding as it chases a deceptively simple goal: making it cheaper to move goods by air than by road. Greenoaks led the round, with DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures participating — and it lands less than a year after the company's $8.65 million seed, bringing total funding to roughly $50 million.
The bet rests on an aircraft redesign rather than a routing trick. Conventional aircraft spend much of their energy hauling their own weight; founder and CEO Naman Pushp says Airbound's tail-sitter drones are engineered to weigh less than the cargo they carry. The current TRT model weighs about 3.3 pounds and lifts around 2.2 pounds of payload, while the version in development is expected to weigh roughly 6.6 pounds and carry up to 11. Vertical takeoff and landing stays in the design even at larger sizes, because customers like hospitals don't have runways.
The track record is real, if small. Airbound has completed more than 13,000 autonomous flights across Bengaluru and Guntur, including over 1,000 for the Narayana Health hospital network, where diagnostic samples cross about 2.5 miles in seven minutes — a trip that can stretch to five hours by road once bundling delays are counted. An agreement with Andhra Pradesh sketches the scale-up: a three-city network targeting 10,000 flights a day, which Pushp estimates needs around 250 aircraft. The bottleneck is regulatory, not industrial — beyond-visual-line-of-sight approvals gate every network, and the company remains broadly pre-revenue despite employing more than 150 people. Pushp says Airbound wants to be the Boeing of drone logistics, not the airline. Given how much of delivery economics is last-mile labor, that's the more defensible seat to hold — provided regulators move as fast as the aircraft do.
SiFive, one of RISC-V's founding companies, has unveiled its first server platform — and its most important feature is being boring. The BigSky SF-2U870 is a 2U rack system with 32 P870-D cores running at 2.2 GHz, 256 GB of DDR5 memory and 64 lanes of PCIe 5.0, plus support for double-wide accelerators drawing up to 450 watts. As Chips and Cheese's teardown notes, nothing here beats a comparable Xeon on paper: Intel's 6532P-B matches the core count and base clock while adding simultaneous multithreading and a much higher boost clock, and AMD's EPYC 8325P wins most other rows.
But raw specs miss the point of a development machine. BigSky's real milestone is RVA23 compliance — the RISC-V profile that lets mainstream software simply run — which means Ubuntu 26.04 boots out of the box, vector extensions are on board, and continuous-integration jobs work without firmware archaeology. The ecosystem's chronic weakness has been the lack of exactly this kind of dependable, unremarkable developer hardware since the field's consolidations began. Platforms don't win hearts; they win codebases. This is the machine you stop noticing — which is how a software ecosystem actually gets built.
What to watch: whether Airbound's Andhra Pradesh network clears its beyond-visual-line-of-sight approvals on schedule — and whether RVA23 servers start appearing in open-source projects' CI fleets.
Would you trust a drone with your lab samples — and would you build your next project on RISC-V metal? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: TechCrunch · Techmeme · Chips and Cheese · SiFive BigSky SF-2U870
