cargo-drone
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Poseidon Aerospace
Poseidon Aerospace is a San Francisco startup building unmanned cargo aircraft designed to move heavy loads to places without runways. Founded in 2024 by ex-Amazon engineer David Zagaynov and ex-Lockheed Martin engineer Parker Tenney, the company is developing two purpose-built autonomous platforms - Egret, a short takeoff and landing aircraft, and Heron, an amphibious seaplane - each engineered to carry up to two tons roughly 1,500 miles. Backed by an $11M seed round led by Tamarack Global, Poseidon aims to slash the cost-per-ton-mile of air logistics for both commercial feeder routes and contested military supply missions, with first full-scale flight tests targeted for mid-2026.
Grid Aero
Grid Aero is a Palo Alto aerospace and defense startup building the Lifter-Lite, an autonomous, long-range, heavy-lift cargo drone designed to move thousands of pounds across thousands of miles for military and commercial customers. Founded in 2024 by Arthur Dubois - a veteran of Joby Aviation and Xwing - the company is targeting contested logistics in the Pacific theater and remote civilian routes, with a deliberately simple airframe and AI-enhanced autonomy.
Odys Aviation
Odys Aviation is a Long Beach, California deep-tech aerospace company building long-range, hybrid-electric vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft. Its blown-wing design lets aircraft lift off and land anywhere - no runway needed - while flying farther and carrying more than battery-only eVTOLs. With two platforms, the Laila tactical cargo drone and the larger Alta regional aircraft, Odys targets defense, logistics and passenger markets, and has amassed more than $11 billion in signed letters of intent.
Arthur Dubois
Arthur Dubois is the co-founder and CEO of Grid Aero, a Palo Alto-based autonomous cargo aircraft startup building what he calls 'the pickup truck of the skies' - rugged, unmanned aircraft capable of hauling thousands of pounds over thousands of miles to places conventional logistics can't reach. A Stanford-trained aerospace engineer who helped scale Joby Aviation and led engineering at Xwing before its acquisition by Joby, Dubois founded Grid Aero in 2024 after growing frustrated with the complexity and cost of retrofitting legacy aircraft for autonomy. In January 2026, Grid Aero raised a $20M Series A to bring its Lifter Lite autonomous cargo aircraft from prototype testing into real-world military and commercial operations.