San Francisco, CA — Poseidon Aerospace announced today that it has closed an $11 million dollar seed round to develop and manufacture two unmanned cargo platforms: Egret, a short takeoff and landing aircraft, and Heron, a seaplane. The round was led by Tamarack Global with participation from Draper Associates, Starship Ventures, Drover Ventures, Cade Ventures, GoAhead Ventures, and Fortitude VC, with additional investment from angel investors.

Founded in 2024 by David Zagaynov and Parker Tenney, respectively former Amazon and Lockheed Martin engineers, Poseidon Aerospace is building purpose-built unmanned aircraft optimized for heavy-lift cargo missions.

Heron is an unmanned seaplane designed to operate from water, remote coastlines, and austere environments where traditional runways do not exist. Egret is an unmanned short takeoff and landing aircraft optimized for cargo operations in remote environments with unfinished runways and constrained landing zones. Both platforms will carry up to two tons of cargo over ranges up to 1,500 miles. 

Heron and Egret are expected to undergo flight testing in mid-2026.

This fundraise comes at a critical moment for air cargo. By 2035, 50% of current U.S. pilots will be forced to retire due to old age. The planes are aging too: the average age of planes in air cargo fleets is over 25 years. As fleets and pilots age, air cargo prices are increasingly constrained by maintenance costs and staffing shortages. 

"Air cargo economics have been broken for decades," said David Zagaynov, CEO and co-founder of Poseidon Aerospace. "We're not incrementally improving the existing system with autonomy retrofits on aging planes but instead replacing them with purpose-built platforms optimized for cost per flight-ton-mile." In commercial air cargo, cost-per-flight-ton-mile is the decisive metric that determines how efficiently a carrier can convert operating resources like fuel, crew, and aircraft into paid freight movement. 

Poseidon is initially building platforms to target remote communities and underserved routes where air cargo service is constrained, but the company's long-term vision is to build platforms for every route profile: trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic routes, transcontinental domestic freight, and regional networks. Manufacturing platforms at scale optimized for specific routes allows Poseidon to reshape traditional air freight to be as cheap and efficient as possible. 

The same attributes that unlock remote commercial markets are decisive in contested logistics for defense customers. The need to move cargo reliably and affordably over long distances in environments where traditional supply chains are vulnerable is of critical importance. The same distances and island dispersion that constrained the Allies in World War II are further complicated by precision munitions, persistent sensing, and electronic denial. 

The backbone of U.S. airlift—roughly 200 C-17s and fewer than 100 C-5s—cannot absorb losses or scale to contested logistics operations. In potential Pacific conflicts, airfields and ports are not guaranteed, leaving forces dependent on austere logistics networks. When ports and runways are destroyed, the logistical sustainment architecture built for permissive environments fails.

China has already deployed unmanned cargo platforms to support contested logistics operations. Given the nature of a Pacific conflict, Chinese firms have developed platforms capable of distributing goods quickly to contested island chains in the South China Sea. Beyond eVTOLS, these include new heavy-lift unmanned planes and large amphibious seaplanes. Poseidon Aerospace is addressing that gap for the United States. 

Cargo platforms capable of flying unmanned to destinations with degraded or nonexistent infrastructure enable distributed logistics networks that are harder to disrupt and more resilient to adversary denial. In effect, Poseidon is building a network of mass-manufacturable unmanned cargo aircraft that can move goods across islands and remote areas where boats are too slow and runways don’t exist. Decoupling logistics from ports and runways with a fast, flexible, and available platform fundamentally reshapes supply and strategy, altering the nature of warfare.

Parker Tenney, CTO and co-founder, highlighted the importance of scalable production: "We've built prototypes before, but what matters now is manufacturing. We know how to take a design from the lab to production quickly, and that's what the market and the military needs right now.”

Earlier this year, Poseidon completed development of Seagull, its 13-foot wingspan quarter-scale prototype with a proven payload capacity of up to 50 lbs. The company entered into a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division and has demonstrated flight capabilities in littoral zones.

The company has opened an office in Washington, DC to deepen relationships with defense and government customers, and has secured a manufacturing facility in Brunswick, Maine to support scalable production of its vertically integrated aircraft platforms. 

About Poseidon Aerospace

Poseidon Aerospace is an unmanned aerospace company building cargo aircraft designed to radically improve the economics and accessibility of air logistics for commercial and defense customers. The company's mission is to make cost-per-flight-ton-mile as low as possible, starting with feeder cargo routes to remote areas and contested logistics operations.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco with a satellite office in Washington D.C. and a manufacturing facility in Brunswick, Maine.