Three years ago, Adrian Schmidt landed in Bengaluru with a co-founder, a whiteboard, and not much else.
Today his company, Sarla Aviation is running ground tests on the largest privately built eVTOL demonstrator in India, and one of the country’s biggest airlines just decided to back him.
That’s not a slow build. That’s a sprint.
Schmidt didn’t start in aerospace. He trained in transportation design in Germany, then spent his twenties in the auto industry: an internship at Mercedes-Benz, a stint at NIO, three years designing electric vehicles for Volkswagen in Los Angeles.
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The turn came at Lilium, the German air mobility startup, where he worked on product and operations design from 2020 to 2022. That’s also where he met Rakesh Gaonkar, the engineer who’d become his co-founder.
He was midway through a Fulbright-funded master’s degree in New York when he dropped out after year one to start the company. No spin on that decision. It’s just the trade he made.
Founded in October 2023 by Schmidt, Gaonkar, and Shivam Chauhan, Sarla Aviation builds electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, eVTOLs, designed for Indian cities specifically, not adapted from a Western design after the fact. The company is named after Sarla Thukral, India’s first female pilot.
Their aircraft, Shunya, is built to carry six passengers, roughly 680 kg payload, top speed near 250 km/h, aimed at short urban hops of 20 to 30 km, the kind of trip that eats an hour in Bengaluru traffic today.
The company has raised somewhere between $13 million and $13.4 million across pre-seed, seed, and Series A, led by Accel, with angel money from Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath. In 2026, IndiGo Ventures added $1.2 million.
IndiGo was careful to say that’s not a technical endorsement, which is a fair line for a public company to draw. But the check itself says something: India’s largest airline now has skin in this game.
Most startups lead with the flashy milestone. Sarla’s public updates have leaned the other way, toward the grind: cracked ground tests, systems that failed and got rebuilt, a prototype trucked across highways before it ever left the ground.
In December 2025, the company began ground testing a half-scale demonstrator, SYLLA SYL-X1, a 7.5-meter wingspan aircraft built in about nine months. It exists to de-risk systems before the full-scale, 15-meter production aircraft, expected to start development around 2027.
Sarla has also signed MOUs with airports in Bengaluru, Kochi, and Hyderabad, and India’s DGCA is standing up an advanced air mobility sandbox to work through vertiport rules and pilot licensing.
None of it makes headlines the way a flight test does. All of it is the actual work of getting certified.
The company’s target is commercial launch in Bengaluru by 2028. Independent reporting has cited dates ranging into 2030, which is normal for a pre-certification aerospace company. Worth watching, not worth treating as fixed.
A 2.5-year-old company with a half-scale prototype in ground testing and no full-scale flight yet is early, full stop. eVTOL as a category hasn’t proven itself commercially anywhere in the world, not just in India. Sarla hasn’t flown a full-scale aircraft, hasn’t certified anything, hasn’t sold a ticket.
What it has done: moved fast relative to its funding, pulled in an airline as a backer, and built enough credibility that a sitting Minister of Civil Aviation made an unscheduled stop to see the test facility. That combination is a reasonable bet, even if the 2028 date slips.
Adrian Schmidt isn’t promising a date. He’s promising to keep building until it happens.
Learn more about Sarla Aviation at Sarla Aviation or connect with Adrian Schmidt directly on LinkedIn.
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Sources and further reading
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.
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