Solo investor Lachy Groom has backed Alteon, a Bengaluru-based startup founded by 20-year-old Samay Sanghvi, which is attempting to keep an autonomous aircraft airborne for more than a year by harvesting energy from ocean winds. The startup uses "dynamic soaring", a technique inspired by albatrosses, in which a fixed-wing aircraft repeatedly moves between air layers travelling at different speeds to extract energy, potentially removing the need to carry conventional fuel or battery power. If successful, this could enable long-duration uses such as maritime surveillance, giving governments continuous real-time visibility of activity in their waters.

Alteon raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Groom, with participation from Together Fund, and plans to build an aircraft with roughly a three-metre wingspan that flies close to the ocean's surface to gain energy from wind shear, eventually using its propellers as turbines to recharge onboard batteries. The company has already tested its autonomous flight system over the Bay of Bengal, completing seven O-shaped cycles at over 62 miles per hour within one metre of the water. However, it has not yet proven sustained flight from harvested energy alone, and outside experts, including aerospace researchers with backgrounds at MIT and IIT Madras, caution that reliably extracting enough energy from turbulent, unpredictable real-world winds remains a much harder and unproven challenge.