Interview: Skye Air's Ankit Kumar on how drone delivery will reshape gig economy

Picture this: you place an order on an e-commerce or quick commerce delivery app.

However, instead of a delivery agent navigating roads to reach you, a drone now carries the package to your apartment complex, drops it into a designated pod or collection box, and a walker completes the final leg to the doorstep.

Drone-based deliveries, long seen as a futuristic concept, are beginning to take shape in India.

Skye Air Mobility, a Gurugram-based firm, has launched doorstep drone delivery services in Gurugram and Bengaluru.

The company says it has already completed more than 2.6 million deliveries, signalling a potential shift in India’s fast-growing hyperlocal delivery market.

The Indian drone market was valued at $940.6 million in 2024 and is projected to reach $3.23 billion by 2030.

India leads major global markets at a 50.4% CAGR in the drone delivery segment, ahead of China.

“The market has matured faster than most expected,” Ankit Kumar, CEO and founder of Skye Air Mobility, tells Invezz in an interview.

Investors are bullish, with the startup having recently closed a funding round of $9 million, and plans are underway to create a fully autonomous delivery ecosystem.

Kumar also talks about the cost benefits for companies using drones, his views on e-commerce giants building their own in-house drones, and the future of drone deliveries in India.

Invezz: You are one of the leading drone delivery players in India. What has your market experience been like so far regarding customer responses and responses from partner e-commerce and quick-commerce companies? What behavioural or trust barriers still exist among consumers and businesses?

The market has matured faster than most expected.

Our enterprise partners — across e-commerce, quick commerce, and healthcare — are no longer evaluating drones; they're actively integrating them because the math on speed and cost is undeniable.

On the consumer side, the first delivery does all the convincing.

Once someone receives a package via drone, it stops being a novelty and starts being an expectation.

What I'd say is the real remaining challenge isn't trust anymore — it's integration.

How cleanly do drones plug into an existing logistics stack?

That's the problem we've built Skye Air to solve, through what we call Physical AI — drones, smart pods, and ground rovers functioning as one unified intelligent system rather than isolated hardware.

Invezz: You recently secured funding of $9 million. What are your plans for the funds received?

The $9 million goes into three clear priorities.

First, expanding our drone fleet — more aircraft means more capacity, more concurrent deliveries, and the ability to serve clients at a scale that actually moves the needle for their business.

Second, growing our Skye Pod network — pods are the backbone of our distributed logistics grid, and each new pod unlocks a new delivery radius.

Third, improving overall system efficiency — smarter routing, better uptime, tighter integration across the fleet.

The outcome of all three working together is straightforward: more pincodes served, more clients onboarded, and a network that gets meaningfully faster and more reliable with every rupee deployed.

Invezz: What is the cost-benefit to companies using your drones to deliver packages compared to using traditional delivery methods? Can you quantify with an example? Is there a target delivery cost that you are chasing?

Last-mile logistics today costs companies anywhere between 12% to 15% of order value.

That's a significant drag that squeezes margins on every single shipment.

Our target is to bring that down to 6–9% through a combination of drone-based mid-mile, pod-based consolidation, and rover-assisted last-mile.

To put it concretely, a delivery covering 5 to 7 kilometres that takes 30 to 60 minutes by road takes us 7 to 10 minutes.

At scale, we're looking at 20% to 30% cost efficiency gains.

But honestly, the cost story is only half of it.

The other half is consistency — Physical AI eliminates the unpredictability that's baked into manual systems, and that predictability is what enterprise partners truly value.

Invezz: What is your view on competition from large e-commerce players building in-house drone capabilities?

I see it as the strongest validation our industry could receive. It tells you the space is real and the opportunity is large.

But here's the distinction — drone logistics isn't just about flying hardware.

It's about building a full-stack Physical AI ecosystem covering airspace management, ground integration, regulatory compliance, and real-time intelligence.

Large players building in-house will naturally optimise for their own use cases.

We are building shared infrastructure for the entire ecosystem.

I expect this industry to mirror what happened with cloud computing — some enterprises will build in-house, but the majority will rely on specialised infrastructure players.

That's exactly where Skye Air is positioned.

Invezz: How supportive has India's drone policy framework been for commercial scalability, and what are the biggest regulatory bottlenecks that still need to be addressed?

India genuinely has one of the most forward-thinking drone policy frameworks in the world, and I say that without hesitation.

The intent from the government is clear, and the direction is right.

What we now need to match that ambition is execution speed — specifically, faster approvals for BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) operations at scale, clearly defined urban air corridors, and standardised frameworks for last-mile drone delivery.

These aren't insurmountable problems; they're solvable with focused coordination between industry and regulators.

When they're addressed, India doesn't just lead in drone logistics — it becomes the global reference market for how this is done right.

Invezz: You also have a walker who collects the package from the Skye pod and delivers it to a customer's doorstep. Doesn't this feature increase your costs? Do you envision a fully autonomous delivery system, and is a D2C app also on the cards?

The walker in our current model is a deliberate design choice, not a limitation.

It gives us high delivery success rates, a better customer experience at the doorstep, and keeps us compliant within current regulatory boundaries.

But this is very much a transitional state.

The end state I'm building toward is a fully autonomous delivery ecosystem — drones handling mid-mile, Skye Pods acting as intelligent neighbourhood hubs, and rovers completing the last mile without any human in the loop.

Physical AI is what makes that possible. On D2C — our focus right now is squarely on building the B2B infrastructure layer.

Any D2C play, if and when we pursue it, will be built on top of that autonomous network, not before it.

Invezz: How do you expect drone delivery to evolve over the next 5–10 years in terms of scale and mainstream adoption? Do you see it emerging as a viable replacement for segments of the gig economy, or primarily as a complementary layer that enhances existing delivery networks?

Drone delivery will become core logistics infrastructure, especially for time-critical, high-frequency use cases.

But I want to be clear on one thing — this will not replace the gig economy. It will reshape it.

The nature of human involvement in delivery will evolve from execution to oversight, from riding a bike to managing an intelligent system.

That's actually a more skilled, more dignified role. The deeper transformation isn't drones — it's Physical AI in logistics.

Over the next decade, we move from manual, fragmented delivery to autonomous, intelligent networks.

And when that transition is complete, the question won't be "can drones really do this?" — it'll be "why would any serious logistics operation not use them?"