Silicon Valley is known for embracing the ethos of “move fast and break things.” Poseidon Aerospace’s co-founder and CEO David Zagaynov just wants to move things fast. When he was working on logistics at Amazon in 2024, Zagaynov and his Poseidon co-founder Parker Tenney (who was at Lockheed Martin) found themselves repeatedly talking about the rise of advanced air mobility startups. They realized, Zagaynov told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview, that the focus was almost always on introducing flashy new technologies.
For us, we want to improve cargo.” Poseidon Aerospace secured $11 million in seed funding last year in pursuit of this goal. Now, the company has closed a $60 million Series A ahead of the first test flight of its uncrewed cargo plane, Egret, expected by the end of this year. The funding round was led by early-stage VC firm, TQ Ventures, and saw new investments from Hanwha Asset Management, G Squared and JAWS.
Existing backers Starship Ventures, Draper Associates and Drover Ventures also invested. True to Zagaynov’s allergy to getting “nerd-sniped” by promising-yet-currently-unworkable technologies, Poseidon is being built with a ruthless approach to lowering the cost of transporting cargo. The startup is embracing autonomy and remote piloting, but it’s not bothering with the vertical takeoff and landing tech that is de rigueur among so many aviation startups.
There’s also no hydrogen or electric powertrain to be found. Egret and its seaplane variant, Heron, are fixed-wing aircraft powered by regular old combustion engines. If you do that, then abstracting the tech away, we’re left with unmanned cargo like planes that are able to operate on a much lower cost curve, and have much higher utilization.” Zagaynov said Poseidon is initially targeting the defense and regional commercial cargo spaces.
On the defense side, the startup is designing its aircraft so it can service “remote communities and underserved routes where air cargo service is constrained.” Poseidon wants its planes to handle locations with “degraded or nonexistent infrastructure,” because such capabilities make a nation’s logistics capabilities “harder to disrupt and more resilient to adversary denial.” The startup has noted in the past that China is already testing its own cargo drones. On the commercial side, Zagaynov said Poseidon isn’t going to sell its planes. He wants Poseidon to operate its own regional air cargo business in order to compete with existing air cargo carriers for business from UPS, FedEx, and others.
Not requiring pilots for the aircraft also paves the way for Poseidon to operate at lower cost. The autonomy also makes Poseidon a potentially more flexible and dynamic carrier, according to Zagaynov. If demand spikes in a particular region, it will be easier for Poseidon to change its routes since it isn’t planning around a particular pool of pilots who live in one area or another.
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