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

**Rachel Varghese** (0:02)
Sometime in 2022, as Mamaearth's parent company, Honasa Consumer prepared to go public, Varun Alag made two very unusual bets 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 take and 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 SkyAir Mobility. You see, at the time, more than a third of Honasa's sales were still coming through those same large online marketplaces. So, Alag's wager wasn't really about drones. It was about whether brands could one day escape the infrastructure edge that marketplaces held over them.
Cut to 4 years later, those 2 beds have converged. In 2026, Shiprocket integrated SkyAir into its same day delivery network. Together, they now move parcels from brands like Mamaearth, Giva, Lenskart and Bombay Shaving Company. In Gurugram alone, SkyAir 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 of Indian e-commerce. Flipkart, Zepto, Big Basket, Tata 1MG, Blue Dart and even DTDC. Now SkyAir 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 2026, AirBound, a Bangalore-based drone startup began flying diagnostic samples between a Narayana Health Clinic and its central lab over a 4-kilometre corridor. Blood samples that earlier took up to 4 hours by road now arrive in 10 minutes and has entirely replaced the hospital's road network. With this context, Alag's bet 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, Rachel Varghese, and every day of the week, my co-host Snigdha Sharma and I will bring you one new 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 liter of milk or a packet of bread, a Sky Air drone would pick up the goods at a dark store a few kilometers away and fly over at 45 kilometers 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 three minutes for three 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.
That cost stays more or less fixed for any delivery within a 7-kilometre 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 port 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 8 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 neighborhood. 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 labor 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.