Startup Sarla Aviation commences ground testing of air taxi at Bengaluru facility

Mumbai, Dec 22 (PTI) Aerospace startup Sarla Aviation, which plans to roll out electric air taxis for local commuting by 2028, on Monday announced the commencement of ground testing of its taxi programme at its Bengaluru manufacturing facility.

With ground testing now underway, the company's air taxi programme enters its core validation phase, moving decisively beyond digital concepts and laboratory-scale experimentation into real aircraft-scale testing, it said.

It also said that the achievement places India among a small group of nations actively developing next-generation vertical flight systems at an industrial scale.

The platform also said it has raised a total of USD 13 million (around Rs 116 crore) so far across its Pre-Seed and Seed rounds in 2024, followed by a Series A round in January 2025 led by investors Accel and Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath.

The platform in January this year unveiled its prototype air taxi, Shunya, at the Bharat Mobility Global Expo with plans to roll out electric Vertical Take-off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft in Bengaluru in 2028.

"Sarla Aviation has commenced ground testing for its half-scale (7.5-metre wingspan) eVTOL demonstrator, SYLLA SYL-X1, at the company's Bengaluru test facility," the company said.

With a 7.5-meter wingspan, SYL-X1 represents the largest and most advanced private eVTOL demonstrator of its kind currently under development in India, it said.

Achieved in approximately nine months of development and at a fraction of the capital typically required for comparable global programs, the milestone, the company claimed, marks a level of engineering scale, execution speed, and systems maturity not previously demonstrated by a private aerospace company in the country.

The current demonstrator is a functional sub-scale aircraft, purpose-built to validate structural behaviour, propulsion integration, and system-level safety architecture at a meaningful scale.

Unlike academic prototypes or small RC-scale platforms, SYL-X1 is designed with certification intent from the outset, forming a direct bridge toward Sarla Aviation's 15-meter wingspan full-scale aircraft, it said.

Founded in October 2023 by Adrian Schmidt, Rakesh Gaonkar, and Shivam Chauhan and backed by Accel along with angel investors including Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath, the company this year, in August, also brought on board former civil aviation secretary Rajiv Bansal as its Advisor.

"Our focus has never been on being first, but on building to last and on creating an aviation giant. We are building a platform that can be certified, produced, and safely operated, designed and owned entirely in India. Our goal is to take this new era of aviation technology across the finish line for India and bring it home," said Gaonkar, the co-founder and CTO.

The challenge extended far beyond aircraft design alone, encompassing the creation of a certification-aligned flight-test ecosystem, navigation of India's still-emerging aerospace supply chain, the company said.

The company said its technology roadmap targets helicopter-class mission endurance, while fundamentally reducing cost, operational complexity, and safety trade-offs through electric propulsion and integrated systems design. PTI IAS MR