Daybreak - Why Mamaearth's 2022 bet on a little-known drone startup is paying off in unexpected places and for unexpected players

Episode Date: June 21, 2026

In 2022, Mamaearth's founder made two unusual logistics bets: one on a shipping aggregator and one on a small Delhi drone startup nobody had heard of. Now, four years later, those bets have converged into one of India's fastest-growing logistics categories.Drones are now flying blood samples to hospital labs in 10 minutes instead of four hours. They're cutting delivery costs for D2C brands trying to escape marketplace commissions. They're even moving parcels between dark stores for Zepto.But the economics only work in certain places. And India's regulations weren't built with any of this in mind.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Sometime in 2022, as Mama Earth's parent company, Honasa consumer, prepared to go public, Varun Alag, made two very unusual beds on logistics. The first was on shiprocket. You know, the shipping aggregator that tells you your Mintra or Amazon delivery is on the way. It promises brands that they can build delivery networks without relying on large marketplaces like Amazon or Flipkart. The second was on what seemed a lot stranger back then. A small Delhi-based drone startup called Sky Air Mobility. You see, at the time, more than a third of Hunasa's sales was still coming through those same large online marketplaces.

So, a large wageer wasn't really about drones. It was about whether brands could one day escape the infrastructure edge that marketplaces held over them. Cut to four years later, those two bets have converged. In 2026, Ship Rocket integrated Sky Air into its same-day delivery network. Together, they now move parcels from brands like Mama Earth, Jiva, Lenskart and Bombay shaving company. In Gurugram alone, Sky Air says it completes more than 6,000 drone deliveries in a day, ferrying everything from groceries and medicines to iPhones across the city.

And their client list reads like a who's who, who, of Indian e-commerce, Flipcard, Zeptop, Big Basket, Tata 1MG, Blue Dart and even DTDC. Now, Sky Air isn't even an outlier in this drone space, by the way. Commercial drone deliveries are only getting more and more popular. For example, in January 26, Airbound, a Bangalore-based drone startup began flying diagnostic samples between a Narana Health Clinic and its central lab over a four-kilometer corridor. Blood samples that earlier took up to four hours by road now arrive in 10 minutes and has entirely replaced the hospital's road network. With this context, Alag's pet looks almost prescient.

But his wager lies less in the technology itself and more in who is adopting it and why. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Richard Verghase, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nekyllis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Dasherma and I will bring you one news story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday the 22nd of June. A gated apartment complex in South Bangalore. That's where the economics of the drone delivery promise became visible. In May 2025, Big Basket and Sky Air announced a partnership to test aerial grocery delivery

at a 2,500 flat complex on Kanakapura Road. If you were a resident of Prestige Falcon City and placed an order on the Big Basket app, save for a litre of milk or a packet of bread, a sky air drone would pick up the goods at a dark store a few kilometres away and fly over at 45 kilometres per hour bypassing the infamous Bangalore traffic entirely. The drone would reach the complex in under three minutes. It would drop off the order in a booth-like receptacle, which Sky Air calls the skypod, and a dedicated walker from the company

would handle the last stretch of the delivery to your doorstep. And that last stretch is actually where the economics get tricky. Let me explain. What normally takes a delivery rider 10 minutes and costs quick commerce companies 35 to 40 rupees, the drone could theoretically do in 3 minutes for 3 rupees. Ankit Kumar, the founder of Sky Air, estimates that those three rupees cover the cost for the drone, the battery, the drone operator,

and the pod at the drop location. And that cost stays more or less fixed for any delivery within a 7km radius. But unlike a gig rider who's paid per delivery, a walker has to be paid a fixed daily wage of around 800 rupees. So, the per delivery cost depends entirely on how many deliveries the walker makes. Now, a walker typically takes about 10 minutes to go from the pod to the doorstep and come back again. In theory, that allows for a maximum of 48 deliveries over an 8-hour shift, which would bring the per-delivery labour cost down to about 17 rupees. Combined with the cost of the drone, the total is still 50% less than what it costs to pay a bike rider. Now, if that sounds too good to be true,

That's because it is. The actual per-day delivery numbers are much lower, and that is for two reasons. One is that walkers cannot possibly deliver for eight hours on foot continuously without brakes. The second and the larger one is that demand is unlikely to arrive at a pod fast enough to keep the walker close to the ceiling of 48 orders. You see, a dark store aggregates orders from across a whole neighbour. A pod, on the other hand, which is essentially a mini dark store for the Walker, serves the apartment complex and maybe a few buildings around it. As a result, walkers usually complete closer to 20 to 30 deliveries a day. At 30 deliveries, the labour cost rises to about 27 rupees per order.

At 20, it rises further to 40 rupees, which is actually more expensive than the rider this system was meant to replace. And that's how last mile quick commerce drone deliveries are kind of captive to the walker and highly sensitive to order volumes. And this is partly why Big Basket eventually pull the plug on drone deliveries and why Quick Commerce remains only a small part of Sky Air's business roster. Longer distance, middle mile deliveries though are a different story. Here, the walker isn't part of the equation and that helps with the unit economics. Atul Mehta, the CEO of domestic shipping at Ship Rocket, explained this to my colleague, the Ken reporter Mutasim Khan.

Mehta said that if he wants to move a shipment from a warehouse in Patoddy to a warehouse in central Delhi, then a drone helps him collapse that long mid-mile much faster than the road-bound channels. Even for quick commerce, drones work much better as a middle-mile machine. For example, Sky Air flies into dark-store transfers. for Zepto where an order is split between a superstore and a dark store. Think about it. Without the drone, Zepto essentially pays two riders for what is basically one order. But with it, it can pay just one rider.

Kumar, the CEO of Sky Air I mentioned earlier, says that this puts the savings at around 40%. Now, in general e-commerce, the gains compound even further. A quick commerce drone carries one or two parcels, and e-commerce drone can carry 20 to 25. And since 70 to 80% of e-commerce delivery costs sit in the last mile, Mehta explains that even if the middle mile costs were to increase, the total impact would stay manageable. Sky Ayers Kumar explained that this puts the current savings from drone logistics at 15 to 20%, and that number would only rise at scale. As I mentioned earlier, Ship Rocket has already integrated drones into its same-day delivery network,

mainly because brands are increasingly promising delivery speeds that traditional logistics networks cannot support. You see, large marketplaces like Flipkart and Amazon already own their logistics to fulfill their fast delivery promises, but the margins are quite low. So, a cheaper and faster drone for them is a pretty easy buy. But as Sky Air's client roster reveals, the demand is increasingly coming from less obvious sources, like D2C brands. More on this in the next segment.

There's a parallel shift that has been going on among D2C brands for years, and drones are now accelerating it. The thing is, the math of selling on a marketplace is quite brutal. Take, for instance, Amazon and Flipcard. They take 10 to 25% of the selling price. in commissions. Quick commerce platforms take 35 to 50%, which means only products with gross margins above 45% can actually survive the cost of being on a flip card shelf. Still, marketplaces retained power because they controlled two things most standalone brands lacked, visibility and fast delivery. Before drones, brands tried to solve this problem themselves. Mama Earth, for example, built nine

warehouses to support direct website orders. Menswear brand snitch turned its retail stores into hyper-local warehouses so that it could enable same-day delivery. In fact, by 2025, Mama Earth had even reached revenue parity between its online and offline channels. But building your own logistics network is brutal in a different way. In late 2023, Mama Earth launched Project Meave to cut out wholesalers and push directly to small shops across 50 cities.

By late 2024, though, the project had unraveled. The Ken reported that Honasa posted a loss after two profitable quarters post its IPO. Its stock crashed 40% in a week. Distributors revolted over near expiry piling up in their warehouses. And Alak described all of this as a short-term pain for long-term growth. Drones in that sense do offer a less punishing path. A way for D2C brands to close the delivery gap without having to invest as heavily in a road-bound infrastructure.

But that is built on far more than speed. Mehta from Ship Rocket framed it pretty well. Drones, he said, can strengthen the final leg of delivery, which is where Ship Rocket and others like it come in. They run the entire post-order journey for the brands from checkout to doorstep. Mehta called drones the icing on the cake on sales. same-day deliveries. With the cake itself being the broader same-day network, Shiprocket has been building for years now. The proof is already showing, actually. For example, on Valentine's

Day, Shiprocket helped jewelry brand Jiva deliver gift parcels in just two hours using drones. And that same logic works even beyond e-commerce. Take Narayana Health, which adopted drones as part of a broader shift to centralised lab testing. Naman Pushp, the founder and CEO of Airbound, explained to Muttasim that moving samples by road meant unpredictable delays. And if stuck in Bangalore traffic long enough, a sample actually becomes unusable. But since January, Airbound has been flying the 4-kilometer route

between Narayana's clinic to the central lab. Over 50 days, it completed 700-plus flights while carrying up to 40 samples per trip with zero failures. Pushp claims that this system reduced the time from sample draw to lab arrival from four hours to 10 minutes. Narayana retired road transfers entirely within just three weeks of this experiment beginning. Devi Shetty, Narayana's founder, said in March that the model could cut diagnostic costs for patients by half. In fact, Narayana and Airbound have plans to extend the system to five more clinics across Bangalore in the next couple of years, and later to other cities, beginning with Kolkata.

But the thing is, even with all this demand, technology and intent being all in place, there is still one problematic elephant in the room. Regulation. Stay tuned. You see, drones have spent their recent years in war. war zones and surveillance grids, including over India's own borders. And that discomfort now shapes India's regulatory stance towards them. The draft civil drone bill, which was released in September 2025, criminalizes what the existing 2021 rules had treated mostly as a matter of fines.

Flying in restricted airspace can now mean up to three years in jail. India's aviation regulator, the DGCA or Directorate General, of Civil Aviation classifies every patch of sky into red, yellow and green zones. Let me explain. The area around every operational airport is a 5-kilometer red ring where flights are prohibited, followed by a yellow zone which extends up to 12 kilometers outwards from it. Remember how I said that Sky Air finishes 6,000 deliveries a day in Gurugram alone? Well, on a map that shows these different types of zones,

Bangalore and Gurugram don't look anything alike. Gurugram sits pretty far from the Indra Gandhi International Airport perimeter with no military installations that are carving out red spaces. Almost all of the city's operational areas fall in yellow airspace, which is manageable for drones with air traffic control clearance. That's why Sky Air can run 6,000 deliveries in a day over there. Bangalor, on the other hand, though, has three operational airports, including military air bases. Their overlapping red and yellow rings cover most of the city.

The neighborhoods where drone delivery would have its largest customer base, Indranagar, Khoramangla, Hsar layout, Whitefield, sit almost entirely in regulated airspace. In March 26, Sky Air raised $9 million in a series B funding to expand into Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Korkata over the next 18 months. Most of the cities look more like Bangalore than Gurrogram in terms of airspace. And the trouble extends beyond just zoning. India has no beyond visual line of sight or BVLOS regulation, which means there are no rules for flying a drone beyond the operator's actual visual

line of sight, like when it's too far away or when it's behind buildings. Every corridor needs its own approval from civil aviation, the Home Ministry, the Defence Ministry, State Police, District Administration and more. Sky Air's response to this, though, has been to turn the regulatory friction into a moat. Kumar argued that the bottleneck isn't really regulation, its infrastructure, the kind that lets regulators see what drone operators are actually doing in the sky. So, to fix that, Sky Air built an unmanned traffic. management system that hands the DGCA and air traffic controllers a live view of every

sky air drone that is currently in flight. Airbound founder Naman Pushp puts the deeper problem this way. A regulator who approves a policy that goes wrong faces real scrutiny. On the other hand, if a regulator was to approve a policy that helps an industry grow, he would still stand to gain very little. Basically, the incentives for these regulators are very uneasy. For now, drone delivery in India is being held aloft by a small set of companies who are operating within a thin footprint and a regulatory outlook that is still figuring itself out. But the demand is increasing.

And now, what was once a technology in search of a use case has in 2026 become a use case in search of Moorsky. Daybreak is produced from the Newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscription Focused Business News platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters, and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website.

Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.