Aerospace startup Sarla Aviation on Monday announced the start of ground testing for its electric air taxi programme at its Bengaluru manufacturing facility, marking a key step toward its plan to roll out electric air taxis for local commuting by 2028.
With ground testing underway, the company said its air taxi programme has entered a core validation phase, moving beyond digital concepts and laboratory-scale experiments into real aircraft-scale testing. It added that the milestone places India among a small group of countries actively developing next-generation vertical flight systems at an industrial scale.
The company also said it has raised a total of USD 13 million (around Rs 116 crore) across its Pre-Seed and Seed funding rounds in 2024, followed by a Series A round in January 2025 led by Accel and Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath.
In January this year, Sarla Aviation unveiled its prototype air taxi, Shunya, at the Bharat Mobility Global Expo, outlining plans to deploy electric Vertical Take-off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft in Bengaluru by 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.
It added that with a 7.5-metre wingspan, SYL-X1 is the largest and most advanced private eVTOL demonstrator currently under development in India.
Achieved in around nine months of development and at a fraction of the capital typically required for similar global programmes, the company claimed the milestone reflects a level of engineering scale, execution speed and systems maturity not previously demonstrated by a private aerospace company in the country.
According to the company, the current demonstrator is a functional sub-scale aircraft 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 has been designed with certification intent from the outset and serves as a bridge toward Sarla Aviation’s planned 15-metre wingspan full-scale aircraft.
Founded in October 2023 by Adrian Schmidt, Rakesh Gaonkar and Shivam Chauhan, Sarla Aviation is backed by Accel and angel investors including Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath. In August this year, the company also appointed 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 company said the challenge extends beyond aircraft design to building a certification-aligned flight-test ecosystem and navigating India’s still-evolving aerospace supply chain. It added that its technology roadmap aims for helicopter-class mission endurance while reducing costs, operational complexity and safety trade-offs through electric propulsion and integrated systems design.