Lachy Groom, a well-known solo investor, has put money behind a Bengaluru startup with an audacious goal: keeping an aircraft airborne for more than a year by drawing energy from ocean winds. The company, Alteon, was founded by 20-year-old Samay Sanghvi and announced Tuesday that it closed a EUR 2 million pre-seed round.
The round was led by Groom, with participation from Together Fund, and will fund development of autonomous aircraft inspired by dynamic soaring, the technique albatrosses use to pull energy from the wind. Sanghvi told reporters that Groom decided to invest within the first 30 minutes of their initial meeting.
How Alteon plans to keep aircraft aloft
Traditional aircraft must carry all the fuel or battery power a flight requires. Alteon is trying to sidestep that constraint by designing a small, fixed-wing autonomous aircraft that harvests energy from wind shear above the ocean. Dynamic soaring involves repeatedly moving between layers of air traveling at different speeds, allowing the aircraft to gain energy without onboard fuel.
The initial design calls for an aircraft with a wingspan of roughly three meters. It would fly close to the ocean surface, climb and turn through faster-moving air, and repeat the cycle to extract energy from the wind. Eventually, Alteon plans to use its propellers as turbines, converting some of that energy into electricity to recharge the aircraft’s onboard batteries, according to Sanghvi.
“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 plans to first deploy the aircraft for maritime surveillance, giving governments real-time visibility into activity in their waters.
Test flights and technical hurdles
Alteon has not yet demonstrated that its aircraft can sustain flight using energy harvested through dynamic soaring. It did complete a recent test of its autonomous flight system over the Bay of Bengal, where the aircraft autonomously flew seven O-shaped cycles at more than 62 miles per hour, staying within one meter of the water’s surface.
The next major milestone is what Sanghvi describes as energy-neutral dynamic soaring, which would let the aircraft fly continuously with propulsion switched off, extracting enough energy from the wind to remain aloft.
Dr. Gabriel Bousquet, a Silicon Valley aerospace and robotics engineer who researched dynamic soaring during his PhD at MIT, called Alteon’s low-altitude flight over water a “promising first result.” He noted the harder challenge is proving the aircraft can reliably extract enough energy from real-world winds to sustain flight over long periods. Flying low enough to harvest that energy safely is especially difficult, Bousquet said, since the aircraft must contend with turbulence, waves, spray, rain, and shifting light while continuously sensing and reacting to a moving ocean surface.
Dr. Bharath Swaminathan, who earned his PhD from IIT Madras studying the stability of dynamic soaring, said the underlying physics is well established and called Alteon’s effort commendable. Keeping an aircraft airborne for several days using dynamic soaring would
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