The air cargo industry’s been coasting on fumes, aging fleets, rising costs, and a pilot shortage that’ll ground half the workforce by 2035. While others debated automation, Poseidon Aerospace just built it. Founded in 2023 by David Zagaynov, Parker Tenney, and Isaac Baumstark, this San Francisco startup isn’t tweaking legacy aircraft, it’s designing unmanned cargo planes from scratch to crush cost-per-flight-ton-mile. Their mission is simple: make air freight faster, cheaper, and harder to stop. The lineup? Egret, a short takeoff-and-landing workhorse for runways, and Heron, a seaplane that can launch from nearly any body of water on Earth. No cockpit. No crew. No wasted weight. Just raw logistics power.
Poseidon just raised $11M in seed funding led by Tamarack Global, with Draper Associates, Starship Ventures, Drover Ventures, Cade Ventures, GoAhead Ventures, Fortitude VC, Mana Ventures & Shor Capital in the mix. Jamie Lee of Tamarack called Poseidon “one of the few teams rethinking air cargo from the ground up.” That’s not PR, it’s prophecy. Tamarack’s founders, Jamie Lee & John McCormick, have a track record of backing “Maniacs on a Mission,” and Poseidon fits that creed to the rivet.
CEO David Zagaynov went from UC Berkeley to Amazon Lab126 before deciding to stop fixing systems and start building new ones. CTO Parker Tenney, Cal Poly alum & Lockheed Martin veteran, brings the hardware firepower. Cofounder Isaac Baumstark, whose great-grandfather founded the Curtiss Candy Co., adds entrepreneurial DNA that’s practically printed in his bloodline. Together, they’ve got Poseidon operating like a stealth bomber with a business plan.
Their Seagull prototype already proved the vision’s real: a 13-ft carbon-fiber aircraft that can haul 100 lbs of cargo over 120 miles using Starlink for autonomous control. Poseidon’s also inked a CRADA with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division, showing it can deliver where the military needs it most. With Egret & Heron in mid-build and flight tests set for mid-2026, Poseidon’s 15K-sq-ft Dogpatch facility in SF and new Brunswick, ME plant are buzzing like launchpads for the future of freight.
This isn’t about adding autopilot to an old bird, it’s about engineering new wings for a world running out of runways. Poseidon Aerospace isn’t chasing the sky; it’s redesigning what it means to move through it. When your aircraft can fly from land, sea, or nowhere at all, you stop asking permission. You just take off.
