Indian startup Alteon has raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed funding round led by individual investor Lachy Groom, with participation from Together Fund, to develop small fixed-wing aircraft theoretically capable of remaining airborne for months by harnessing wind energy above the oceans.
The company was founded in Bengaluru by Samay Sanghvi, who was 20 years old when he founded it, and he began working on the idea after leaving high school in 2023. Alteon was formally established in 2025, with early support from Emergent Ventures and 1517. It currently has a team of 20 people working in a 10,000-square-foot facility.
How does Alteon want to keep the aircraft airborne?
The idea relies on a technology known as dynamic soaring, a technique used by albatrosses to extract energy from differences between layers of air moving at different speeds. Instead of carrying fuel or relying entirely on a battery with limited capacity, the aircraft repeatedly moves between layers of air near the sea surface to gain energy from wind shear.
Alteon initially plans to build an aircraft with a wingspan of about three meters. The aircraft will fly close to the water’s surface, then climb and turn through faster-moving layers of air before repeating the cycle. The company is also studying the later use of the propellers as turbines to convert some of the harvested energy into electricity and recharge the batteries onboard the aircraft.
Initial test, not proof of the ultimate capability
Alteon recently conducted a test of its autonomous flight system over the Bay of Bengal, during which the aircraft independently completed seven O-shaped circuits at a speed exceeding 62 miles per hour and at an altitude of no more than one meter above the water’s surface.
However, this test does not yet prove that the aircraft can maintain flight using energy harvested from the wind. The next stage is what the company calls energy-neutral dynamic soaring, meaning operating the aircraft continuously with the propulsion turned off while extracting enough energy to prevent it from losing altitude.
Why does this matter?
If successful, the idea could enable a long-endurance aerial surveillance platform over maritime areas without the need to land repeatedly for recharging. Alteon initially targets using its aircraft for maritime surveillance, giving governments real-time visibility into activity within their waters. However, this use remains a future plan, not a proven service or available product.
Experts quoted by TechCrunch point out that the underlying physics of dynamic soaring is well understood, but turning it into a reliable system represents the biggest challenge. Wind shear and local turbulence can change quickly, and the aircraft must also deal during low-altitude flight with waves, spray, rain, and changing lighting conditions while maintaining continuous sensing of a moving ocean surface.
Gabriel Bousquet, an aerospace and robotics engineer who studied dynamic soaring during his Ph.D. at MIT, described low-altitude flight over water as a promising initial result, but emphasized the difficulty of proving that sufficient energy can be extracted under real-world conditions. Bharath Swaminathan, who studied the stability of dynamic soaring during his Ph.D. at IIT Madras, also said that keeping the aircraft airborne for several days would itself be a major achievement.
Alteon says it is currently building four to five aircraft per week for testing and has conducted more than 200 test flights over the past 30 days. The crucial unresolved question remains whether these tests will lead to continuous, energy-neutral flight, rather than merely short autonomous flights near the sea surface.