New Delhi. India’s drone logistics ambitions have just taken a giant leap skyward. Bengaluru-based aerospace company Airbound has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Andhra Pradesh Drone Corporation to develop a scalable drone delivery network across the Amaravati Capital Region, marking a significant step towards building aerial logistics infrastructure in India.
The agreement was formalised in New Delhi, with APDC Chairperson and Managing Director Geetanjali Sharma and Airbound Founder and CEO Naman Pushp signing the pact in the presence of Union Civil Aviation Minister Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu.
The initiative, formally called the Amaravati Capital Region Drone Delivery Network (ACR DDN), is sweeping in its ambition. Airbound will work with ecosystem stakeholders across healthcare, logistics, and e-commerce to enable drone operations, connecting Amaravati, Vijayawada, and Guntur, with both parties working towards enabling 10,000 daily drone flights across Andhra Pradesh over the coming year – a scale that could position the state among the largest commercial drone delivery networks globally.
The phased rollout is expected to include pilot operations, route mapping, ecosystem partnerships, regulatory coordination, and the gradual development of interconnected drone corridors across the Amaravati Capital Region. Operations are expected to begin with Guntur as the launch hub.
At the heart of the network is Airbound’s proprietary aircraft, the TRT. Constructed from lightweight carbon fibre and weighing just 1.5 kilogrames, the UAV achieves a payload-to-weight ratio of 1.5:1, a significant improvement over the conventional industry standard of 4:1. This design innovation allows delivery costs to be reduced up to twenty times compared to traditional methods, lowering transit expenses to as little as 10 paisa per kilometre.
Typically, electric two-wheelers are used in India to deliver payloads weighing under 3 kilogrames, even though the vehicles themselves weigh around 150 kilogrames and cost about ₹2 per kilometre in energy. Airbound aims to cut that cost down to as low as 10 paise by using its drone, which is built specifically for small payloads and removes the need for a human driver, reducing total transport weight by roughly 30 times.
The company is not without a track record. Airbound has already completed more than 10,000 drone flights in India and previously partnered with Narayana Health in Bengaluru to support healthcare logistics, carrying out over 1,000 drone deliveries for medical use cases. A 54-day pilot programme connected the Narayana Health Chandapura Clinic in Bengaluru to a central laboratory in Electronic City, completing more than 700 flights and carrying up to 40 diagnostic samples per flight – with zero failures, according to Pushp.
That experience is now being leveraged at scale. Speaking at the signing, Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu described the project as proof of India’s sovereign capabilities: he noted that by partnering with a home-grown company to build one of the world’s largest drone delivery networks, Andhra Pradesh is demonstrating that cutting-edge technology can be designed, built, and scaled in India, delivering real connectivity, jobs, and growth.
Geetanjali Sharma of the APDC framed it as structural transformation: the collaboration is intended to build a new logistics architecture for the state and position Andhra Pradesh as a global hub for drone innovation, with the goal of making the state one of the best places in the world to build, test, and scale the future of logistics.
For Airbound’s founder, the vision goes further still. Naman Pushp said the company aims to build a shared drone logistics network that can move individual packages directly between locations, rather than relying on conventional vehicle-based transportation – and when it works in Amaravati, Vijayawada, and Guntur, it becomes a template for how cities and states across India can treat drone delivery as shared infrastructure that anyone can plug into.
Founded during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 and backed by $8.65 million in seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Humba Ventures, and senior leaders at Tesla, SpaceX, and Anduril, Airbound projects aim to reach a million deliveries flights per day by the middle of 2027. For now, with the skies of Andhra Pradesh opening up, that future is beginning to take shape – one drone flight at a time.
