In 2020, on the peak of the pandemic, when colleges had shut and a 15-year-old, Naman Pushp, was confined to his dwelling, he turned to one thing he had been doing since childhood: constructing robots. His curiosity in drone-making started out of boredom through the lockdown.
There was no grand marketing strategy behind it. Pushp, who had grown up partly in Malaysia, was on the lookout for one thing to construct through the lockdown. He known as the mission Open Drone and took it to a hackathon. It received him $500. He put the prize a reimbursement into the mission and used it to construct his first severe prototype.
That drone nonetheless hangs on the wall of Airbound’s workplace.
Six years later, Pushp, now 21, is the founder and CEO of Bengaluru-based aerospace startup Airbound, which has raised $37 million in a Sequence A led by Greenoaks, taking the corporate’s whole funding to almost $50 million.
The journey between the primary drone and the newest funding spherical can also be a narrative of a younger founder studying to show an engineering drawback right into a enterprise.
FROM MALAYSIA TO MUMBAI
Born in Mumbai, Naman Pushp spent components of his childhood in Hyderabad and Malaysia earlier than returning to India, the place he accomplished his education at Dhirubhai Ambani Worldwide Faculty in Mumbai.
His curiosity in constructing issues started early; whereas in Malaysia, he began making easy robots in Lessons 5 and 6 and later took half in robotics competitions and engineering tasks. By the point he reached senior college, Pushp was more and more drawn to studying by constructing somewhat than by way of typical lecture rooms.
His LinkedIn profile says he accomplished Class 12 and was admitted to Carnegie Mellon College, however selected to not attend, deciding as a substitute to pursue his personal tasks and ultimately construct Airbound.
Pushp was nonetheless in class when he obtained his first enterprise cheque from GradCapital at 16. There was an uncommon complication: as a result of he was a minor, traders needed to converse to his father earlier than making the funding. He later secured admission to Carnegie Mellon College however selected to not go.
As an alternative, he stayed with the issue he had encountered whereas constructing drones.
Typical plane, he realised, spend a lot of their vitality carrying their very own weight. The payload, the factor being transported, turns into secondary. That makes drone supply troublesome to compete with highway transportation on price.
Airbound’s method is to reverse that equation.
Its present TRT plane weighs about 1.5 kg and may carry round 1 kg of cargo. It takes off vertically earlier than transitioning to horizontal flight. The corporate is creating a mannequin able to carrying a 5 kg payload and plans to develop manufacturing.
“We wish to construct in direction of a world the place all the pieces has price parity with trucking,” Pushp has mentioned in a put up he shared on LinkedIn.
The thought is not confined to prototypes.
Airbound has accomplished greater than 13,000 autonomous flights throughout Bengaluru and Guntur, together with greater than 1,000 flights for Narayana Well being. The corporate now transports blood samples between a clinic and a hospital, changing floor transport on that route.
The dimensions of that experiment is putting. Narayana Well being’s new Banashankari hospital in Bengaluru was designed with no diagnostic laboratory, counting on Airbound’s drones to maneuver medical samples between amenities.
The service at present handles as many as 20 flights a day on one clinic-to-hospital route.
Pushp’s ambition is bigger nonetheless. In Andhra Pradesh, Airbound plans to attach Amaravati, Vijayawada and Guntur, with a long-term goal of 10,000 flights a day.
The state authorities helps create a community of floor observers so that non-public operators can use the infrastructure whereas preserving flights inside visible line of sight.
For Pushp, the subsequent problem is manufacturing. Airbound is betting on light-weight carbon-fibre plane that may be produced at scale.
“100 plane a day will begin to really feel very small,” he mentioned in an occasion.
It’s an ambition that captures the arc of his journey: a schoolboy constructing a drone throughout lockdown, an adolescent elevating his first cheque, a college admission he selected to say no, and, at 21, an organization making an attempt to make drone supply a part of on a regular basis logistics.
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