Bengaluru’s technology startup Alteon has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding to further its goal of building autonomous aircraft that can remain airborne for more than a year, powered by winds over the ocean.
Ambitious Project Gains Investment
On Tuesday, Alteon announced the completion of its funding round, led by solo investor Lachy Groom and joined by Together Fund. 20-year-old Samay Sanghvi, Alteon’s founder, managed to gain Groom’s support within just minutes of their introductory meeting. The technology at the heart of the firm draws inspiration from the albatross, a bird known for its ability to harness wind currents and travel vast distances at sea with minimal energy by using dynamic soaring techniques.
Unlike conventional airplanes that depend on carrying extensive fuel or batteries, Alteon aims to overcome these restrictions. The company is designing small, fixed-wing drones that continually harvest energy from ocean wind shear during long-duration flights.
Innovation Modeled on Nature
Plans call for the aircraft to have a wingspan of three meters. The operation involves flying close to the ocean surface, climbing up into the swift air currents, and banking to repeat this process, picking up additional energy with each maneuver. Ultimately, Alteon hopes to transform the drone’s propellers into wind turbines, enabling the craft to convert some of the wind energy into electricity and recharge its batteries while in flight.
Sanghvi envisions these persistent flying platforms serving a variety of uses. “Once you build airplanes that can stay in the air for more than a year, there are millions of things you can do with them,” he explained. The company’s foremost goal is to deploy the drones for maritime monitoring, which could offer governments ongoing, real-time surveillance of their maritime boundaries.
Recent Progress and Technical Obstacles
Continuous, energy-neutral flight using the dynamic soaring concept remains unproven at Alteon. However, the team recently accomplished a significant step during a test over the Bay of Bengal: their prototype drone autonomously completed seven consecutive O-shaped loops at speeds above 62 miles per hour, all while maintaining flight within one meter of the ocean surface.
Looking ahead, the critical milestone is “energy-neutral dynamic soaring,” in which the aircraft sustains flight indefinitely by relying solely on wind energy, with its motor disengaged.
Alteon’s initial achievements have won praise from outside specialists, but experts caution that significant challenges remain. Dr. Gabriel Bousquet, an aerospace engineer formerly at MIT who specializes in dynamic soaring, called the Bay of Bengal flight a “promising first result” but emphasized that the core challenge is proving the aircraft can reliably draw enough energy from variable ocean winds for uninterrupted flight. He also highlighted the demanding nature of maintaining stable, controlled flight amid high turbulence, ocean waves, changing weather, and variable lighting—a test of the drone’s robustness and control algorithms.
Dr. Bharath Swaminathan, who earned his PhD at IIT Madras studying dynamic soaring stability, remarked that getting a drone to stay airborne continuously—even for several days—would be “a very big step, and a big achievement” due to unpredictable wind shear and turbulence, issues that only extensive real-world testing can fully reveal.
From Early Models to Startup Expansion
Sanghvi started developing the dynamic soaring aircraft concept in 2023, following his high school graduation. He began by teaching himself model building and piloting simple prototypes, advancing to increasingly sophisticated designs. By 2025, he had officially founded Alteon and secured seed investments from Emergent Ventures and 1517.
Now, Alteon runs its operation from a 10,000-square-foot facility in Bengaluru, supported by a 20-member team. According to Sanghvi, the startup is currently assembling four to five drones each week, and over the past 30 days, has carried out more than 200 test flights.
Lead investor Groom admits that pursuing such an engineering breakthrough involves considerable risk but remains optimistic about the company’s ability to succeed. “Ambitious problems are always going to come with risks. For me, it came down to believing Samay and the Alteon team are the ones to figure them out,” he said.
For additional details about Alteon’s technology and mission, visit Alteon’s website.