Beyond Food Delivery
After building Zomato into one of India's most recognised technology companies and overseeing its transformation into Eternal — a multi-business conglomerate spanning food delivery, quick commerce, B2B supply, and live events — Deepinder Goyal turned his attention to a very different challenge: regional aviation.
Millions of Indians live in cities without efficient air connectivity. India has over 400 cities with populations above 100,000. Fewer than 100 of them have functional commercial airports. The rest are connected, if at all, by roads and railways that can take 8–12 hours to cover distances a plane would cover in 45 minutes.
LAT Aerospace was founded on a simple conviction: that electric aviation technology, applied intelligently to India's geography, could solve a connectivity problem that neither roads nor high-speed rail can fully address.
Electric Short Take-Off Aircraft
The technical bet at LAT Aerospace is specific. Conventional commercial aircraft require runways of at least 2,000 metres — infrastructure that costs hundreds of crores to build and years to commission. Most of India's underserved cities could not justify that investment even if the funding were available.
LAT Aerospace is focused on developing electric short take-off and landing (eSTOL) aircraft — planes designed to operate from runways as short as 300–500 metres. This means existing airstrips, military fields, and purpose-built landing pads in district headquarters could become viable aviation nodes.
The combination of electric propulsion (lower operating cost) and eSTOL capability (lower infrastructure requirement) is the core product thesis. If it works, it doesn't just connect more cities — it creates an entirely new category of Indian aviation.
The Founder's Logic
Deepinder Goyal's move into aerospace is not as surprising as it might appear. His pattern as a founder has always been the same: identify a problem where the existing infrastructure is fundamentally inadequate, build a technology layer that makes a better solution economically viable, and scale aggressively once unit economics are validated.
He did it with restaurant discovery (Zomato), with quick grocery delivery (Blinkit acquisition), and now he is attempting it with regional air mobility.
The project reflects a broader trend in Indian deep tech: founders who built their first companies on software and logistics are now turning to hard engineering problems — aerospace, energy, defence — where the barriers to entry are high but the market opportunity is generational.
LAT Aerospace is in stealth as of 2026. But in a country with 400 underserved cities and a founder who has already built one of India's most valuable companies, the ambition has earned its audience.