Bengaluru's Aspera unveils Eureka, an autonomous amphibious cargo aircraft targeting sub-$1 per tonne-km

What Aspera has built

Bengaluru startup Aspera Industries has unveiled Eureka, an autonomous amphibious cargo aircraft designed to carry 1,000 kg of freight over a stated 2,000 km range, cruising at roughly 6,500 ft with no pilot on board. According to a dev.to analysis drawing on ITLN reporting, a subscale prototype has already flown, though no commercial service date has been set.

The company was founded in June 2025 by Khushi Mittal, who left a physics and computer science degree at the University of Alberta to pursue it, per Startup Pedia reporting cited in the same piece. The commercial pitch rests on a gap in freight economics: around 80% of world trade moves by sea because air freight costs roughly 20 times more per tonne, and manufacturers hold three to six weeks of buffer stock to absorb slow ocean legs. Aspera's aim is to compress journeys measured in weeks into same-day flights.

Water as existing runway infrastructure

The amphibious design is a geographic argument. Per IDRW, cited by dev.to, 150 of the world's 193 countries have a coastline and water covers about 71% of the planet. If an aircraft can treat rivers, lakes and harbours as runways, it sidesteps the cost and years-long lead time of building airstrips.

Traditional seaplanes largely faded after the 1950s for a physics reason: the stepped hull that lets a fuselage plane across water also produces heavy aerodynamic drag in cruise, imposing a permanent fuel and range penalty. Eureka's answer is retractable hydrofoils — small wing-like surfaces that lift the hull clear of the water during takeoff and landing, then fold away so the airframe flies clean at cruise. As dev.to frames it, the entire business case hinges on whether that mechanism works reliably.

The cost target

Aspera says it is aiming for an operating cost below $1 per tonne-kilometre on the first aircraft, dropping under 50 cents at fleet scale. These are company engineering goals, not demonstrated prices. The dev.to analysis identifies three conditions the number must survive: a high payload fraction from a cargo-first airframe rather than a passenger-derived design; regulatory acceptance of routine uncrewed freight operations over water and near cities; and high utilisation across a large fleet, which is where many aviation cost projections historically collapse.

Even at twice the launch target, per the same analysis, urgent, perishable and high-value goods that default to sea freight today would gain a genuine middle option. The goal is not to displace container shipping outright.

A funded, global race

Autonomous cargo is a competitive field rather than a solo bet. Elroy Air's Chaparral, a hybrid-electric VTOL with a 500+ lb payload and up to 450 miles of range, won a $46 million multi-year US Army contract on August 18, 2026; AIN's coverage, cited by dev.to, notes the work targets contested environments where runways do not exist. Natilus, meanwhile, is developing autonomous blended-wing-body freighters from regional to transoceanic concepts. Eureka shares the no-runway logic but achieves it with water instead of vertical lift.

Aspera's first target markets are New Zealand, Australia and Southeast Asia — archipelago-heavy geographies where water runways are a natural fit — with India to follow later, per ITLN. The company plans to serve logistics providers, freight forwarders and defence customers, and intends to operate the aircraft itself rather than only manufacturing them.

What remains unproven

Everything decisive is still ahead: full-scale flight testing, certification for uncrewed operations, and real-world fleet economics. The sub-$1 figure is a target nobody can buy today. The dev.to piece argues the metric that will decide whether autonomous amphibious cargo is a product or a press release is demonstrated cost per tonne-kilometre on an actual route, repeatedly.

Why it matters

Eureka sits precisely in the gap between cheap, slow sea freight and fast, expensive air cargo, and it attacks the infrastructure problem — runways — rather than the vehicle alone. It is also a signal of a broader shift: an Indian private startup attempting a complete aircraft, autonomy stack and logistics network is now a plausible venture rather than an outlier, arriving alongside defence money flowing into autonomous logistics globally. For shippers in coastal and island markets, the practical move now is quantifying what weeks of sea transit actually cost in spoilage, missed sales and buffer inventory — so they know their number if and when services like this reach certification.