Poseidon Aerospace Raises $60M Before First Pilotless Cargo Flight
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Poseidon Aerospace has closed a $60 million Series A ahead of the first test flight of Egret, its uncrewed cargo plane, which the company expects before the end of this year. The round was reported on September 8, 2026.
TQ Ventures led the financing. Hanwha Asset Management, G Squared, and JAWS came in as new investors, and existing backers Starship Ventures, Draper Associates, and Drover Ventures returned. The company raised $11 million in seed funding last year.
Poseidon is based in San Francisco, California, and has expanded into a former Navy hangar in Alameda to build its full-size aircraft, which has a 50-foot wingspan. Last year the company built and flew a quarter-scale version called Seagull.
Co-founder and CEO David Zagaynov was working on logistics at Amazon in 2024 when he and co-founder Parker Tenney, then at Lockheed Martin, kept returning to the same observation about advanced air mobility startups: most of them were built around new technology rather than around moving cargo more cheaply. Poseidon’s design philosophy runs the other way. The company uses autonomy and remote piloting but skips vertical takeoff and landing, hydrogen, and electric powertrains. Egret and its seaplane variant, Heron, are fixed-wing aircraft with conventional combustion engines, chosen for the energy density of liquid fuel.
Removing the pilot changes the economics in several ways. There is no cockpit and no life support, which pulls structural weight out of the airframe and improves the ratio of payload to empty weight, allowing lighter and more efficient engines. There are also no pilot duty-hour limits, so an aircraft can fly a five-hour leg and turn straight around instead of sitting overnight while a crew rests.
The company is targeting two markets first: defense and regional commercial cargo. On the defense side, the aircraft are designed to serve remote communities and underserved routes, including locations with degraded or nonexistent infrastructure, which makes a nation’s logistics harder to disrupt. On the commercial side, Poseidon does not plan to sell planes. It intends to run its own regional air cargo operation and compete with existing carriers for business from shippers such as UPS and FedEx, with the flexibility to shift routes as demand moves and to fly more point-to-point trips rather than relying on a hub-and-spoke model.
Poseidon is about to go on a hiring spree as it pushes toward first flight. The company also points to a friendlier regulatory climate, including a recent Federal Aviation Administration pilot program that eases testing for new aircraft startups, as opening a path to commercialization that did not exist five to ten years ago.