Alteon Raises $2.5 Million to Develop Wind-Powered Autonomous Aircraft

Alteon, a Bengaluru-based aerospace startup, is pursuing an ambitious goal: building an autonomous aircraft capable of remaining in the sky for more than a year by harvesting energy from ocean winds.

The company, founded by 20-year-old Samay Sanghvi, announced Tuesday that it has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by solo investor Lachy Groom, with participation from Together Fund. The capital will support Alteon’s efforts to develop small, fixed-wing autonomous aircraft inspired by the flight techniques of albatrosses.

Groom was convinced of the company’s potential almost immediately. According to Sanghvi, the investor decided he wanted to back Alteon within the first 30 minutes of their initial meeting. The investment reflects both the scale of the company’s ambition and the growing interest in autonomous systems capable of operating for long periods without conventional fuel or frequent battery charging.

Traditional aircraft must carry the fuel or stored electrical power needed to complete a mission. Alteon is attempting to challenge that limitation through a maneuver known as dynamic soaring. Albatrosses use the technique to travel vast distances over the ocean by repeatedly moving between layers of air traveling at different speeds.

During dynamic soaring, an aircraft gains energy from wind shear. It moves through slower and faster-moving air in a carefully controlled cycle, allowing it to maintain or increase its speed without relying continuously on engine power. Alteon’s goal is to translate that natural strategy into an autonomous flight system.

“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,” Sanghvi said. The company’s first planned application is maritime surveillance, potentially giving governments continuous visibility into activity across their territorial waters.

Alteon initially plans to build aircraft with wingspans of approximately three meters. The vehicles would fly close to the ocean’s surface, climb into faster-moving air, turn, and descend again in a repeating pattern. Over time, the company expects to use the aircraft’s propellers as turbines, converting some of the harvested wind energy into electricity and recharging onboard batteries.

The proposed system could eventually enable aircraft to operate for extremely long periods without landing. That would make them useful for persistent surveillance, monitoring shipping routes, tracking illegal fishing, observing environmental conditions, and supporting search-and-rescue operations.

However, Alteon has not yet demonstrated that its aircraft can sustain flight indefinitely using energy collected through dynamic soaring. The company’s current work remains focused on proving that its autonomous flight system can operate safely and reliably near the ocean.

Alteon recently completed a test over the Bay of Bengal in which one of its aircraft autonomously performed seven O-shaped flight cycles at speeds exceeding 62 miles per hour. The aircraft flew within approximately one meter of the water’s surface, demonstrating the company’s ability to control an autonomous vehicle in an unusually demanding environment.

The next major milestone is what Sanghvi calls “energy-neutral dynamic soaring.” In that scenario, the aircraft’s propulsion system would be switched off while the vehicle extracted enough energy from wind shear to remain airborne.

Achieving that result would be a major technical step. The aircraft would need to perceive changes in wind speed and direction, maintain an accurate position relative to the water, and continuously adjust its flight path. It would also have to manage those tasks without consuming more energy than it gathers.

Dr. Gabriel Bousquet, a Silicon Valley aerospace and robotics engineer who researched dynamic soaring during his PhD at MIT, described Alteon’s low-altitude flight over water as a “promising first result.” He cautioned, however, that the more difficult challenge will be proving that the aircraft can reliably obtain sufficient energy from real-world winds over extended periods.

Operating close to the sea creates several additional hazards. The aircraft must contend with turbulence, waves, spray, rain, and changing light conditions. It must also sense and respond to the constantly moving surface below it. A small error in altitude or positioning could result in a collision with the water.

Bousquet noted that safe low-altitude flight requires the aircraft to make rapid decisions in an environment that is difficult to predict. Unlike a controlled laboratory setting, the ocean can change quickly, and the local conditions that determine whether dynamic soaring works may vary from one moment to the next.

Dr. Bharath Swaminathan, who earned his PhD from IIT Madras researching the stability of dynamic soaring, said the underlying physics are well established. He described Alteon’s effort as commendable, while emphasizing the difficulty of implementing the concept in an autonomous aircraft.

Even keeping a vehicle airborne for several days using dynamic soaring would represent “a very big step, and a big achievement,” Swaminathan said. Although broad wind patterns can be forecast, local wind shear and turbulence may fluctuate substantially. Those variations could make it difficult for the aircraft to extract energy consistently.

Some of the most serious challenges may only become apparent through real-world testing. Computer models can simulate many conditions, but they cannot fully capture every combination of wave movement, spray, turbulence, sensor limitations, and weather that the aircraft may experience during a long flight.

Groom acknowledged the risk involved in funding the project. “Ambitious problems are always going to come with risks,” he said. “For me, it came down to believing Samay and the Alteon team are the ones to figure them out.”

Sanghvi began developing the technology shortly after leaving high school in 2023. He taught himself how to build aircraft by constructing and crashing radio-controlled models before moving on to more advanced prototypes.

He formally founded Alteon in 2025 and received early support from Emergent Ventures and 1517. The company has since grown to a team of 20 people based in Bengaluru and operates from a 10,000-square-foot facility.

The startup is currently building four or five aircraft each week for testing. Sanghvi also said Alteon has carried out more than 200 test flights during the past 30 days, suggesting that the company is pursuing an unusually rapid development cycle.

That pace may allow Alteon to gather the flight data needed to refine its aircraft and autonomous control systems. Dynamic soaring depends on precise interactions between the vehicle and the surrounding air, so repeated testing will be essential. Every flight can provide information about energy consumption, control responses, sensor performance, and the conditions under which the aircraft gains or loses altitude.

If Alteon succeeds, its technology could represent a new category of long-endurance aircraft. Most drones are limited by battery capacity, while conventional aircraft rely on fuel. A vehicle able to draw energy from the environment could remain on station for weeks, months, or potentially longer, reducing the need for repeated launches and landings.

The technology would not be without limitations. The aircraft would depend on suitable wind conditions, and its low-altitude operating profile could create safety and reliability concerns. Regulatory approval, communications, maintenance, and the practical challenges of recovering or replacing aircraft would also have to be addressed.

For now, Alteon remains at the proof-of-concept stage. The company’s recent autonomous test demonstrates that its aircraft can perform demanding maneuvers near the ocean, but energy-neutral flight is still ahead.

The startup’s plan nevertheless reflects a growing interest in designing machines that work with natural systems rather than relying entirely on stored energy. By studying the flight of albatrosses, Alteon hopes to create autonomous aircraft capable of persistent observation over the world’s oceans.

The $2.5 million investment will give the company additional resources to test that idea. Its ultimate goal keeping an aircraft airborne for more than a year remains technically uncertain, but the early experiments suggest that Alteon has begun building the systems required to find out whether such a feat is possible.