We’ve said it before and we’ve said it again: Sometimes, the most game-changing tech isn’t flash-bang missiles or one-way attack drones. Sometimes, it’s the less sexy stuff needed to get critical supplies—food, ammo, med kit—to the front as quickly and safely as possible.
Grid Aero was founded to meet this need. This morning, the autonomous aviation startup emerged from stealth with $6M in funding, co-led by Calibrate Ventures and Ubiquity Ventures, and a promise to build a cheaper, “autonomous air cargo network” that can meet the resupply needs of the military.
Founded by former employees of aviation big-dogs Joby Aviation, Xwing, Northrop Grumman, and the U.S. Air Force, the company has already built an autonomous cargo aircraft called “Lifter-Lite” that it compares to a pickup truck. It’s rugged, cheap, modifiable, and able to carry a shit-ton of stuff.
They’ve also secured a Direct to Phase II SBIR from AFWERX, which Grid Aero CEO Arthur Dubois told Tectonic is “R&D-type funds” that will allow the company to build and hone its aircraft alongside DoD partners, to meet DoD needs.
To the front: Military logistics are no easy thing. (Just ask our boy Clausewitz.)
Frontline troops need a whole bunch of stuff—from food, to medical supplies, to fuel, to weaponry—to fight wars, and it’s not always a cakewalk to get it to them. In places like the Indo-Pacific (in, say, 2027), that can mean flying a C-130 (which can cost anywhere from $70M to $170M) to a teeny-tiny forward operating base on a puny little island through enemy fire.
“What folks worry about… is what if there’s a conflict one day and we start losing some of these assets, and we’re not able to do logistics, or are very limited in the kind of logistics we can do in the Pacific,” Dubois said.
To Dubois, this system made no sense. Why risk super-pricey aircraft when a drone could do the job? He and a team of aviation experts founded Grid Aero in 2024 in California to build a plane that could do what the C-130 could, but at a fraction of the price and without risking human lives.
“The shift from massive, expensive platforms to distributed fleets of smart, affordable systems is long overdue—and essential for the future of global logistics,” he said in a statement. The company wanted “to try to address some of the logistics shortfalls that [he] and others had identified,” he told Tectonic.
(Not so) tiny little plane: The result—or at least the initial result—was the Lifter-Lite, which the team says it designed and built in just six months.
- While Dubois couldn’t give us the exact price of the unmanned cargo aircraft, he said it’s an “order of magnitude, on a pound per pound basis, cheaper than any other solution that can actually fly this mission.”
- Because the aircraft is designed to be modifiable, payload and range are both flexible. “You can trade range for payload, but broadly speaking, think of the range as being the… Guam to Japan, Guam to Australia, type routes, which also can be extended if we carry less payload,” Dubois said.
- The inverse is true, too—depending on range, the payload can be anywhere from about 1,000 to 10,000 pounds.
- The aircraft built by Grid won’t be weaponized, but that doesn’t mean someone won’t put weapons on it. “When you give folks a pickup truck, they can put stuff on it,” Dubois said.
“We’re basically building a flying pickup truck that can do thousands of pounds and thousands of miles,” he added. The company officially closed its seed round last November and started building the plane in January of this year. They’re aiming to move the aircraft to a test facility for taxiing in September.
Split the difference: Grid Aero aims to build cargo solutions for both military and commercial customers in the future, but they’re starting things out laser-focused on the military.
“We are starting to work with commercial partners around what that service will look like, but we feel like there’s greater urgency on the defense side with the tension in the Pacific and the DoD really making a shift to focus on logistics,” Dubois said.
While Dubois couldn’t tell us who, exactly, would be buying their plane, he said it “is a particularly good fit early on for the special ops community, the Army, the Marines…everybody that’s operating in these Pacific Island environments that still needs their stuff carried.”
The runway ahead: With their current pile of cash, Grid Aero says it plans to keep developing the Lifter Lite and honing it based on feedback from DoD partners. They’ve already got some interesting feedback from the Air Force, Dubois said, on the aircraft’s “human touchpoints” (where it interacts with real, live, human users).
Once they get the aircraft to a test facility in September, they’ll start taxi tests, then get it up in the air to fly in circles, then eventually load it with cargo and push for greater range and higher altitudes. All the while, they’ll make changes based on what works and what doesn’t.
“You can expect that there’ll be a few more iterations of this…between now and when we deliver to our customer a finished product,” Dubois said.
While the team plans to get the plane into the air quickly (like, well within the next year), Dubois was reluctant to give an exact date. “Trying to force a date on a team of engineers, it’s almost always a mistake,” he said.
But he does say they plan to have the plane in the hands of the military by 2027. And the goal, he said, is to work closely enough with the Air Force and the rest of the DoD that the plane will be something they actually need.
“We’re not in love with technology. We’re really trying to solve a problem, and I think agility is kind of our best weapon,” he said, “We’re trying to build a team that can iterate quickly, because we know we’re not getting the perfect product on day one.”