Prominent solo investor Lachy Groom has backed Alteon, a Bengaluru startup attempting an ambitious feat: keeping an aircraft airborne for more than a year by harvesting energy from ocean winds. Founded by 20-year-old Samay Sanghvi, Alteon announced Tuesday it raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding, with Together Fund also participating.
Interestingly, Groom moved remarkably fast on the deal. According to Sanghvi, Groom decided he wanted to invest within the first 30 minutes of their initial meeting. Because conventional aircraft must carry the fuel or battery power a flight requires, Alteon aims to break that fundamental limitation entirely through a technique inspired by nature.
Once you build aircraft that can stay in the air for more than a year, there will be millions of possible applications for them.
– Samay Sanghvi
The startup designs small, fixed-wing autonomous aircraft that extract energy from wind shear above the ocean through dynamic soaring. This maneuver, which albatrosses use naturally, involves repeatedly moving between air layers traveling at different speeds. Alteon’s initial aircraft will feature a roughly three-meter wingspan, flying close to the surface, climbing, turning through faster-moving air, then repeating the cycle to gain energy. Eventually, the company plans using its propellers as turbines to recharge onboard batteries.
The aircraft flies a repeating looping pattern to exploit that speed difference:
- It dives down into the slower-moving air near the water’s surface.
- It builds up speed in that lower layer.
- It then climbs sharply, crossing up into the faster-moving air above.
- Because it enters the faster layer while already moving, it effectively “gains” airspeed from the boundary between the two layers.
- It turns and repeats the cycle continuously.
Alteon plans initially deploying these aircraft for maritime surveillance, giving governments real-time visibility into their waters. However, the startup has not yet demonstrated sustained flight using harvested energy. It did complete a recent test over the Bay of Bengal, where the aircraft autonomously flew seven O-shaped cycles at more than 99 kilometers per hour within one meter of the water’s surface.
Naturally, when people hear about such a technology, with a marketing tagline of “a plane that flies non-stop for 400+ days,” they become skeptical. On Indian Defense subreddit, people asked the same concerns:
Sanghvi began building aircraft straight out of high school in 2023, crashing radio-controlled models before developing prototypes. Alteon now employs 20 people, builds four to five aircraft weekly, and completed over 200 test flights in the past 30 days.
To those unfamiliar, Lachy Groom is an Australian entrepreneur, prominent angel investor, and co-founder of the robotics company Physical Intelligence.
