Prominent solo investor Lachy Groom has placed an early bet on Bengaluru-based Alteon, a startup pursuing one of aviation’s most ambitious goals: keeping an aircraft in the air for more than a year without refueling or recharging. The company announced Tuesday that it had raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Groom, with participation from Together Fund. Founded by 20-year-old Samay Sanghvi, Alteon is developing autonomous aircraft inspired by dynamic soaring, the technique used by albatrosses to extract energy from wind over the ocean.
Sanghvi said Groom decided he wanted to invest within the first 30 minutes of their first meeting. Groom, who has built a reputation for making early, concentrated bets on ambitious founders, acknowledged the technical risk behind the startup’s mission.
An aircraft that harvests energy from the sky
Most aircraft carry the fuel or battery power they need for the duration of a mission. That imposes hard limits on endurance. Alteon is trying to break free of that constraint by designing small, fixed-wing autonomous aircraft that can pull energy from wind shear above the ocean through dynamic soaring.
Dynamic soaring is a maneuver in which an aircraft repeatedly moves between layers of air traveling at different speeds. By climbing through faster-moving air, turning, and descending into slower-moving air, a vehicle can gain energy from the wind itself. Albatrosses use this technique to fly extraordinary distances while expending very little energy. Alteon hopes to replicate that biological trick in an engineered aircraft capable of staying aloft for more than a year.
“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 initial focus is maritime surveillance, which would give governments a long-endurance, real-time view of activity in their waters without the operational cost of crewed patrol aircraft or the battery limits of conventional drones.
From high school garage to ocean winds
Sanghvi began working on what would become Alteon immediately after finishing high school in 2023. He learned to build aircraft by making and crashing radio-controlled models before developing early prototypes. In 2025, he formally founded Alteon. The company received early support from Emergent Ventures and 1517 before attracting the new pre-seed funding.
Alteon plans to begin with an aircraft of roughly three meters in wingspan. The aircraft would fly near the ocean surface, climb, turn through faster-moving air, and repeat that cycle to gain energy from the wind. Later versions are expected to use propellers as turbines, converting some of the energy harvested from dynamic soaring into electricity to recharge onboard batteries.
Progress and the next big test
The startup has not yet demonstrated sustained flight using only energy harvested through dynamic soaring. It has, however, completed meaningful early testing. In a recent autonomous flight over the Bay of Bengal, Alteon’s aircraft completed seven O-shaped cycles at more than 62 miles per hour while flying within one meter of the water’s surface.
Alteon calls its next major milestone “energy-neutral dynamic soaring.” That would allow the aircraft to fly continuously with propulsion switched off, extracting enough wind energy to remain airborne. If achieved, it would be a significant step toward the company’s longer-term promise of multi-month or even yearlong missions.
The company is already building four to five aircraft per week for testing at its 10,000-square-foot facility in Bengaluru. Sanghvi said Alteon has conducted more than 200 test flights in the past 30 days, reflecting an aggressive iteration cycle.
Expert views: promising but difficult
Dr. Gabriel Bousquet, an aerospace and robotics engineer who studied dynamic soaring during his PhD at MIT, called Alteon’s low-altitude flight over water a “promising first result.” He cautioned, however, that the harder challenge will be proving the aircraft can reliably extract enough energy from real-world winds to sustain flight over long periods.
Bousquet noted that flying low enough to harvest dynamic soaring energy safely is especially tricky. The aircraft would need to contend with turbulence, waves, spray, rain, and changing light conditions while continuously sensing and reacting to a moving ocean surface. That makes the engineering problem far more complicated than simply demonstrating dynamic soaring in calm conditions.
Dr. Bharath Swaminathan, who earned his PhD from IIT Madras studying the stability of dynamic soaring, said the underlying physics is well established. He described Alteon’s effort as commendable, adding that keeping an aircraft airborne for several days using dynamic soaring would itself be “a very big step, and a big achievement.”
Swaminathan also pointed to a key practical obstacle: although large-scale wind conditions can be predictable, local wind shear and turbulence vary substantially. That variability could complicate an aircraft’s ability to continuously extract energy from the wind. Some of those challenges, he suggested, may only emerge through real-world flight testing.
“Ambitious problems are always going to come with risks,” Groom said about the investment. “For me, it came down to believing Samay and the Alteon team are the ones to figure them out.”
The broader aviation industry is watching such efforts closely. Long-endurance aircraft have multiple potential applications, including ocean monitoring, communications relay, environmental sensing, and disaster response. Yet the history of experimental aircraft is also full of bold promises undone by the gap between controlled demonstrations and real-world endurance.
For now, Alteon’s team of 20 in Bengaluru remains focused on scaling up its test program and reaching energy-neutral flight. The company’s ability to turn a five-minute autonomous maneuver into days or weeks of wind-powered flight will determine whether its ambitious vision becomes a reliable reality.
Source:TechCrunch News