Three years ago, Adrian Schmidt landed in Bengaluru with a co-founder, a whiteboard, and very little else. Today, his company is running ground tests on the largest privately developed eVTOL demonstrator in India, and one of the country’s biggest airlines just decided to back him.

That is not a slow burn story. That is a sprint.

From Munich to Bengaluru, by way of Detroit and Shanghai

Schmidt did not start in aerospace. He trained in transportation design at Pforzheim University in Germany, then spent his twenties bouncing through the car industry: an internship at Mercedes-Benz, a stint at NIO in Munich, three years designing electric vehicles for Volkswagen in Los Angeles. It reads like a resume built for the automotive world, not the aviation one.

The pivot came at Lilium, the German air mobility startup, where Schmidt worked on product and operations design for regional air mobility systems from 2020 to 2022. 

That is also where he met Rakesh Gaonkar, the engineer who would become his co-founder. Somewhere in that overlap, both of them decided the more interesting problem was not electric cars in Europe. It was electric aircraft in a country neither of them had built anything in yet.

Schmidt was midway through a master’s degree in management and strategic design at The New School in New York, on a Fulbright Scholarship, when he dropped out after the first year to start Sarla Aviation. He has been open about that decision, not romanticizing it, just stating it as the trade he made.

What Sarla Aviation actually is

Founded in October 2023 by Schmidt, Gaonkar, and Shivam Chauhan, Sarla Aviation is a Bengaluru-based aerospace startup building electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, eVTOLs, designed specifically for Indian cities. 

The company is named after Sarla Thukral, India’s first female pilot, which tells you something about how the founders wanted the brand to read: rooted in India, not imported from somewhere else.

Their flagship aircraft is called Shunya, a six-passenger eVTOL with a payload capacity of roughly 680 kilograms, a top speed near 250 km/h, and a design intended for short urban hops of 20 to 30 kilometers, the kind of trip that currently eats an hour or more in Bengaluru traffic.

The company has pitched it as the highest-payload eVTOL in its class, letting it carry more passengers per flight at a lower ticket price than Western competitors.

Getting there required money, and Sarla has raised it in stages. The company has pulled in roughly $13 to $13.4 million across pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds, including a $10 million Series A round led by Accel, with angel participation from Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath. 

In 2026, IndiGo’s venture arm, IndiGo Ventures, added a $1.2 million investment, a signal that matters less for the dollar amount and more for who wrote the check: India’s largest airline, choosing to have a stake in how this plays out. 

IndiGo was careful to clarify the investment is not an endorsement of Sarla’s technical capability, which is a fair distinction for a public company to draw, and Schmidt has framed the backing as a turning point for how India moves, not just for his company.

The unglamorous part: ground testing

Startups selling the future tend to lead with the flashy stuff, first flight, first customer, first city. Sarla’s public updates have leaned the other way, toward the grind: cracked ground tests, systems that failed and had to be rebuilt, a prototype that traveled by truck across highways and hill roads before it ever left the ground.

In December 2025, the company began ground testing a half-scale eVTOL demonstrator named SYLLA SYL-X1, a 7.5-meter wingspan aircraft built in roughly nine months and described as the largest privately developed eVTOL demonstrator in India.

It exists to de-risk the systems before Sarla commits to building the full-scale, 15-meter production aircraft, expected to begin development around 2027.

The company has also been building the regulatory relationships that eVTOLs need before they can carry a single paying passenger. 

India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation is establishing an advanced air mobility sandbox to work through questions like vertiport development and pilot licensing, and Sarla has signed memorandums of understanding with airports in Bengaluru, Kochi, and Hyderabad. 

None of that generates headlines the way a flight test does. All of it is the actual work of getting an aircraft certified.

Sarla’s own target is a commercial launch in Bengaluru by 2028, with plans to expand to other cities and to eventually run a free air ambulance service on the same aircraft platform. Independent reporting has cited timelines ranging from 2028 into 2030, which is normal for a pre-certification aerospace company. Worth watching, not worth treating as fixed.

Why the “built in India” framing matters

Schmidt talks about this company as a correction to a specific pattern: complex aircraft systems designed abroad and shipped into India for assembly, rarely originated there. Whether or not you buy the full framing, it is a coherent business bet, not just a marketing line. 

An aircraft engineered for Indian conditions, Indian regulatory realities, and Indian price sensitivity is a genuinely different product than a Western eVTOL adapted after the fact.

It is also a smart position for a foreign-born founder building in India. Schmidt, a German national, has leaned into being embraced as part of the country’s ambitions rather than positioning himself as an outsider bringing technology to India from outside. That is not just good optics. It is a real advantage in an industry where public trust and regulatory goodwill move slower than product development.

The honest read

A three-year-old company with a half-scale prototype in ground testing, roughly $13 million raised, and a 2028 commercial target is early. 

Aerospace timelines slip more often than not, and eVTOL as a category globally is still unproven at commercial scale anywhere in the world, not just in India. Sarla has not flown a full-scale aircraft yet, has not certified anything, and has not sold a ticket.

What it has done is move fast relative to its own funding, attract serious institutional backing including an airline, and build enough credibility that a sitting Minister of Civil Aviation made an unscheduled stop to see the test facility in person. 

That combination, capital discipline plus regulatory access plus a founder willing to publicly show the failures alongside the wins, is a reasonable bet even if the 2028 date moves.

Adrian Schmidt is not promising India will fly by a certain date. He is promising to keep building until it does.

Sources and further reading

• Sarla Aviation, Wikipedia
• Sarla Aviation unveils Shunya eVTOL, Business Standard
• Sarla Aviation unveils its Shunya eVTOL at Bharat Mobility Global Expo, Urban Air Mobility News
• IndiGo Investment to Accelerate Sarla’s eVTOL Aircraft Plans, Raksha Anirveda
• Sarla Aviation unveils made-in-India Shunya air taxi, The Week

Note: cross-check every figure above against Sarla Aviation’s own press page before publishing, since funding totals and timelines have been updated more than once as the company has raised additional rounds.

Learn more about Sarla Aviation at Sarla Aviation or connect with Adrian Schmidt directly on LinkedIn.

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