In December 2013, Jeff Bezos walked onto the set of 60 Minutes and showed America a video: A drone lifting a package from an Amazon warehouse, flying across a suburban landscape, and depositing a yellow box on a customer’s lawn. The internet collectively lost its mind. Half the world called it the future. The other half called it a stunt. Thirteen years and over $2 billion later, Amazon Prime Air presents scaling problems and mounting scepticism.
Meanwhile, a Series A startup operating out of Gurgaon with $7 million in total funding has quietly completed 3.6 million drone deliveries without comparable incident. And this week, Skye Air Mobility announced what might be the most audacious step yet in India’s logistics story — the country’s first fully autonomous drone-to-doorstep delivery system, unveiled at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.
No rider, no calls: drone-and-rover deliveries roll out in Gurgaon
The system integrates Skye Air’s hyperlocal delivery infrastructure — called Skye Port — with ‘Arrive Points’, smart mailbox units developed by NASDAQ-listed Arrive AI, installed in residential complexes across Gurgaon. Drones carry packages weighing up to 10 kg from warehouses to these secure units. Autonomous rovers built by US-based Ottonomy then complete the final leg to the consumer’s doorstep, where an OTP unlocks the delivery. No rider. No bike. No phone call for the gates is open. “India is the first country in the world where we are starting this,” says Ankit Kumar, founder & CEO, Skye Air Mobility.
The path to this moment was anything but linear. Kumar, a mechanical engineering graduate from KIIT University in Bhubaneswar, started his career as a graduate trainee in sales and marketing at Mahindra & Mahindra’s Swaraj Tractors division in 2012. Tractors in Punjab were a long way from drones over Gurgaon, but the stint gave him an instinct for where India’s physical infrastructure breaks down. He moved to consulting, helping foreign companies enter the Indian market, before founding his own firm, Alternative Global, in 2016, focused on EVs and clean technology. He co-founded RE-Rise, a virtual incubator. He mentored clean energy startups. He was building a comfortable consulting career.
But working across sectors, Kumar kept bumping into the same problem: Last-mile logistics in India was broken. In cities, delivery riders burned fuel and racked up fines to shave minutes off timelines. In remote areas — Himachal Pradesh’s snowbound villages, the Northeast’s inaccessible hamlets — people went without essential medicines for days because roads didn’t exist. A journey from Mandi to Hamirpur takes over two hours by road. By drone, 30 minutes.
In 2019, Kumar co-founded Skye Air with Chandra Prakash, Shrikant Sarda and Swapnik Jakkampudi. When the Drone Rules 2021 liberalised commercial operations, Skye Air was ready. Its first flights were not about delivering sneakers. In September 2021, the company partnered with Blue Dart for Telangana’s “Medicine from the Sky” project — India’s first Beyond Visual Line of Sight drone flights, ferrying COVID vaccines in temperature-controlled boxes.
The milestones were crossed rapidly: 104 km between Baruipur and Medinipur for Flipkart Health+ — the world’s longest commercial BVLOS delivery at the time; 100 kg of Lakadong turmeric from remote Meghalaya; 170 km of BVLOS trials in Himachal; indigenous drones showcased at the Dubai Air Show. By early 2022, Skye Air had crossed 1,000 flights in six months.
Skye Air moves 2 lakh parcels a month in Gurgaon; operates in eight cities
Today, the company handles roughly 200,000 packages every month in Gurgaon alone, works with clients including BlueDart, DTDC, Shiprocket and Ecom Express, and operates across eight cities. It expanded to Bengaluru in March 2025 with seven-minute drone deliveries. All of this has knocked off over a thousand tonnes in carbon emissions.
The numbers are impressive. But they also invite an uncomfortable question: Beyond medicines and essentials in hard-to-reach areas, does India actually need doorstep drone delivery? Kumar’s answer is more nuanced than most tech founders would offer. Skye Air has created “Skywalkers” — gig workers who manage deliveries within residential complexes, earning ₹800-900 daily with zero fuel or maintenance costs. That’s elegant but whether the model can absorb the scale of displacement that full automation would eventually imply remains an open question.
India’s drone market is projected to grow from $0.47 billion in 2025 to $1.39 billion by 2030. Skye Air, with Rs 1.63 crore in annual revenue and $7 million in total funding set against the ambition of a nationwide autonomous delivery network, still has a considerable distance between proof of concept and profitability. What Amazon promised on primetime television with the full force of the world’s largest retailer behind it, Ankit Kumar is building in a country where the airspace is more complex, the regulations less settled, and the stakes considerably higher.