Labor Day phone deals get a lot more interesting once you stop looking at a single retailer. I checked Amazon and Best Buy and narrowed the current discounts down to six phones that stand out on price, value, or both, from a $200 Motorola to Samsung’s latest Ultra flagship.

Samsung Galaxy S25+

Amazon has the Galaxy S25+ 256GB for $679.99, down from $999.99, making it one of the strongest discounts in the roundup. We found its battery life and performance excellent in our Galaxy S25 Plus review, while seven years of software support gives it plenty of life ahead. At $320 off, its aging cameras are much easier to forgive.

Apple iPhone 16e

Best Buy has the iPhone 16e 128GB for $499.99, down from $599.99 as a Labor Day Deal. It’s the least expensive iPhone in this lineup and makes the most sense for anyone who wants Apple’s current software ecosystem without spending flagship money. The $100 discount also puts it below several midrange Android phones, which makes the value proposition considerably more interesting.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra

The Galaxy S26 Ultra 256GB is $1,099.99 at Best Buy, down from $1,299.99, with the retailer labeling it a Labor Day Deal. Our Galaxy S26 Ultra review found it one of the most complete Android phones available, with excellent cameras, strong performance, and the S Pen. It’s still expensive, but $200 off helps.

Motorola Moto G Power 2025

You don’t have to spend anywhere near $1,000 to find a worthwhile Labor Day discount. Best Buy has the Moto G Power 2025 128GB for $199.99, down from $299.99. That $100 saving is substantial at this price, and the phone’s big battery makes it particularly appealing for anyone who prioritizes endurance over flagship-level cameras or performance.

Apple iPhone Air

The iPhone Air 256GB is $849.99 at Best Buy instead of $999.99, saving $150. It’s a pricier Apple option than the 16e, but the extra storage and more premium hardware make it a better fit for buyers who want something closer to flagship territory. Best Buy is explicitly listing the discount as part of its Labor Day deals.

Nothing Phone (4a) Pro

Amazon rounds out the list with the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro at $539, down from $599. The retailer currently marks it as a limited-time deal, and its distinctive design, 144Hz AMOLED display, and triple-camera setup give it plenty of personality compared with more conventional midrange phones. It’s not the biggest discount here, but $60 off makes the package easier to recommend.

DATABASES

Dutch in-process OLAP systems set to be the ‘SDK for data’ as developers scale systems, cloud giant claims after DuckLab acquisition 

Last week, AWS bought DuckLabs, the people behind the open source OLAP system DuckDB. Since the cloud giant already owns a data warehouse – in Redshift – and it doesn’t get the DuckDB intellectual property (it remains open source), then why would it bother?

Andy Warfield, AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer, argued the acquisition is a major plank of AWS’s thinking when it considers the future of application building, data, and analytics.

“Half of why DuckDB is perceived as being valuable is as this kind of connective tissue layer across existing data processing tools,” he told The Register.

Written in C++, DuckDB is embedded within a host process. There is no DBMS server software to install, update, or maintain. It runs in the host application’s memory space with queries executing directly within the process. As such, developers can build analytics inside their applications, but Warfield said the design means developers and data engineers have new ways of connecting data sources and processing engines.

For example, DuckDB employs verbs in SQL such as “attach” and “connect” that allow it to work with almost any remote SQL endpoint. Warfield said DuckDB is already capable of connecting to Redshift or RDS, issuing SQL commands, and performing cross-engine interactions.

“In a lot of senses, we can treat it as [being] like an SDK for data that customers can build with, and they can run the large proportion of their queries that are small, and work over smaller data sets locally without having to stand up an external engine. Yet, as they graduate to work with larger datasets, or need centralized query capabilities, they can still use DuckDB as a way of passing those queries on to those other engines,” he said.

The concept applies to analytics and data systems from other vendors — such as Google’s BigQuery and Microsoft’s Fabric — as much as AWS’s own products.

“You can build with Duck, and it provides the path to graduate and to submit inquiries against something else, like a singular interface for data,” he said.

AWS acquired DuckLabs, the support and development company founded by DuckDB developers Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, both academics at Amsterdam’s Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica mathematical and theoretical computing research center. The database itself will remain open source under the MIT License.

Led by Mühleisen and Raasveldt, the DuckDB Foundation will remain an independent non-profit organization setting the strategic direction of database development. The governance of that Foundation is expected to change to include a broader spectrum of contributors as a result of the AWS acquisition of DuckLabs.

Andy Pavlo, VP of Research at ClickHouse Labs and professor of Databaseology at Carnegie Mellon University, said the AWS acquisition of DuckLabs would be a positive change for DuckDB. “Hannes and Mark did it their way from the very beginning. They eschewed VC money in 2020 and just focused on building a database system that solved real problems for people. I don’t see them changing the long-term direction of the open source project.”

The benefit of AWS money would come in providing funding to bring new ideas to reality. “The cost of DBMS development has increased greatly in the last few years. It’s not just the cost of humans working on the software, but also the agents that run tests, write code, review pull requests, and handle other system administrative tasks. Since agents are writing code faster than humans, that means more CI/CD infrastructure costs. Amazon will provide DuckDB resources to keep pace with modern DBMS development practices and scale their efforts.”

But AWS is not the only company betting on the founding principles of DuckDB. Former Google BigQuery engineer Jordan Tigani co-founded MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on the database, and is a regular contributor to the DuckDB project. In 2023, it gobbled up $52 million in VC money.

“Of course I’m nervous about the acquisition. Anyone with a stake in the DuckDB ecosystem is going to be nervous when a hyperscaler comes in and acquires the team behind the technology,” Tigani told The Register.

But he added that there would also be positive outcomes for people who care about DuckDB because the resources behind its development would increase.

“Open Source DuckDB is likely going to go faster. Yes, for that to happen you’d have to believe that Amazon isn’t going to meddle too much and break things, but I have a lot of faith in Hannes and Mark.”

In terms of the tech build around DuckDB, MotherDuck has a four-year head-start, he said. “We have built an amazing product that goes beyond just cloud-hosted DuckDB. We have developed expertise running DuckDB at scale and as critical infrastructure.”

If DuckDB remains true to its open-source principles, others can do the same. ®

An ECG takes a few seconds to record and costs very little. Researchers at Imperial College London have trained an AI system that can read one in under two seconds and identify signs of heart failure and valve disease that clinicians cannot detect from the same trace.

The results were presented at the European Society of Cardiology congress in Munich and reported by the Guardian on Monday. The trial covered 67,000 patients in the United States.

The tool identified up to 81% of heart failure cases and up to 90% of valve disease cases, despite using a test that was not originally designed to detect either condition.

“Superhuman AI” is the phrase Dr Ahmed El-Medany, a British Heart Foundation clinical research fellow at Imperial, used to describe the system.

The claim is relatively specific: the signal is present in the recording, but clinicians cannot reliably extract it from the ECG on their own.

The clinical problem it is designed to address is largely a problem of capacity. “Patients can often wait several months for a heart ultrasound scan after being referred for one by their doctor,” said Professor Fu Siong Ng, professor of cardiology at Imperial.

Heart failure is also a condition where delays can have serious consequences. The disease progresses over time, and treatment is generally more effective when it starts earlier, leaving patients in a queue while their condition continues to change.

An echocardiogram requires a trained sonographer, specialised equipment and an appointment. An ECG, by contrast, can be recorded using ten electrodes and a nurse, which is why it is performed much more frequently.

The idea is therefore to use the AI for triage rather than as a replacement for clinicians. If software can analyse ECGs that are already being taken and identify patients who are more likely to have a structural heart problem, those patients could be prioritised for an ultrasound instead of moving through the waiting list in the same order as everyone else.

“Technology like the AI ECG in this research could be a solution to help fast-track patients most likely to have a heart abnormality,” said Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, a consultant cardiologist at the British Heart Foundation.

Cost is another reason the approach could work at scale. ECGs are among the cheapest and most widely used medical tests, so adding software to analyse recordings that are already being collected would require relatively little additional infrastructure or expense.

The current trial also sits on a much larger research programme. Ng’s group trained its models on 1.6 million ECGs from Brazil that were linked to patient records, along with several million additional recordings from the United States.

The wider programme looks beyond heart failure and valve disease. The models have also been used to identify heart attacks and arrhythmias, as well as conditions outside cardiology, including diabetes and kidney disease.

The researchers have reported accuracies of 83% to 93% for heart disease and 70% to 80% for the other conditions.

The Brazilian dataset is an important part of that work because the recordings are linked to what subsequently happened to the patients.

That gives the models a way to learn which patterns in an ECG were associated with diagnoses that emerged later, rather than simply learning to recognise conditions that had already been identified when the test was taken.

The research has also moved beyond the university. The BHF-funded work is being commercialised through a spinout called Cardiovolt.ai, with Ng serving as chief medical officer and Dr Arunashis Sau as chief scientific officer.

The team’s next stated step involves hardware as well as software. Handheld ECG devices with the AI built into the workflow could eventually take the technology beyond hospitals and into settings where ECGs are easier to perform, although that would also change the role of the system from helping clinicians prioritise existing patients to potentially identifying people who have not yet been referred for further testing.

Britain has an unresolved regulatory question around this kind of technology. The country has a strong academic pipeline for cardiovascular deeptech, including research that is already producing new approaches to cardiovascular disease, but moving from an academic result presented at a medical congress to routine use in hospitals requires a separate process of clinical validation and regulatory approval.

The current system has not yet gone through that process. An AI tool that identifies patients who should be referred for further investigation is making a clinical claim, which means it would need to meet the relevant medical device requirements before being deployed at scale in the UK.

There is also a difference between what has been presented at a medical congress and what has been demonstrated in routine clinical practice.

The trial suggests that information about heart failure and valve disease can be extracted from an ECG that was not designed to detect either condition, but it does not yet show whether using that information in real clinical settings leads to earlier treatment or better outcomes for patients.

Amazon runs a second-price auction for its search ads, a system in which the winning advertiser is supposed to pay one cent more than the next-highest bid.

The Federal Trade Commission now alleges that Amazon charged advertisers their full winning bid roughly 80% of the time instead.

The agency and 22 states sued Amazon on Monday, in a case first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The complaint covers seven years of advertising activity involving more than one million brands and sellers.

The reason second-price auctions became common in digital advertising is that they are supposed to make honest bidding the rational choice.

If an advertiser knows it will pay only slightly more than the next-highest bidder, there is little reason to deliberately bid below what the ad is worth to the business.

That makes the difference between the auction Amazon describes and the one the FTC says it actually ran particularly important. A second-price auction is not just a label for a particular type of bidding system.

It tells advertisers how their bids will translate into the prices they ultimately pay, and the FTC’s argument is that Amazon advertised one set of rules while applying another.

The agency says Amazon “covertly and substantially increased the prices that more than one million brands and sellers were required to pay” and estimates that the practice generated tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue.

Amazon is disputing that interpretation rather than accepting the FTC’s description of how advertisers behaved. The company says advertisers set and adjust their bids based on the results they get from advertising, rather than relying on descriptions of the underlying auction mechanics.

In Amazon’s view, that means sophisticated advertisers were making decisions based on performance rather than on the precise way the auction was supposed to work.

There is a problem with that defence, because advertisers can optimise around performance only if the system translating their bids into prices behaves consistently.

If the auction rules differ from what advertisers are told, the fact that they measure outcomes does not make those rules irrelevant; it can make their optimisation less predictable.

Amazon is also pointing to the savings its auction system has generated for advertisers. The company says that taking ad relevance into account saved advertisers more than $8 billion between 2021 and 2025, suggesting that the system should be judged on the prices and results advertisers actually receive rather than on the FTC’s description of a particular bidding mechanism.

The scale of Amazon’s advertising business helps explain why the allegations are potentially so expensive. Its advertising operation generated $68.6 billion in 2025, making Amazon the world’s third-largest digital advertising platform behind Google and Meta.

A large share of that business comes from sellers that have relatively few alternatives. For a merchant that depends on Amazon for distribution and customer access, refusing to buy sponsored listings can be a difficult choice, which is what turns an argument about auction mechanics into a broader question about market power.

Advertising has also become one of the most important sources of profit supporting Amazon’s wider retail operation. Retail margins are relatively thin, while AWS operates as a separate business, leaving advertising as a significant contributor to the company’s overall profitability.

The involvement of 22 state attorneys general could make the financial consequences much larger.

State consumer-protection laws can allow penalties to be calculated on a per-violation or per-day basis, and the complaint covers seven years of conduct involving more than a million advertisers.

TNW reported in June, citing Bloomberg, that a complaint had already been drafted and that the involvement of the states was the element that could push potential penalties into the billions. That complaint has now been filed.

Amazon is already dealing with other major regulatory cases. The company agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle deceptive-practices claims over Prime enrolment in autumn 2025, while a separate antitrust case filed in 2023 is scheduled to go to trial in early 2027.

The advertising case is narrower than that antitrust proceeding, but it could present a different kind of problem for Amazon. The central question is relatively concrete: whether the auction operated in the way the company told advertisers it did.

That is less dependent on competing economic theories than a broader argument about market power, and the FTC says it has evidence covering seven years.

European advertisers will also have a reason to follow the case even though it was filed in the US. The evidence produced during discovery could reveal more about how Amazon’s advertising auctions actually work, and the underlying system is not confined to the American market.

The timing is particularly awkward for Amazon because the company is now defending the auction case while preparing for a broader antitrust trial.

Both proceedings touch on the same underlying question about the company’s relationship with sellers: how much freedom do businesses that depend on Amazon really have to walk away from its ecosystem?

Nothing has been established in court yet. For now, there is a complaint, a set of allegations and figures that Amazon disputes, and a $68.6 billion advertising business whose auction system is suddenly under scrutiny because the rules advertisers were told to trust may not have been the rules being applied.

JBL is taking a shot at the whole-home wireless audio market with the introduction of its new JBL Cove speaker lineup. Known largely for its portable Bluetooth speakers and massive PartyBox models, the audio giant is now branching out with a modular, Wi-Fi-connected system designed to bring high-quality audio to every corner of the house.

A trio of Wi-Fi speakers built for every room

The JBL Cove lineup debuts with three models designed to scale based on room size and portability needs. Every speaker in the series operates over Wi-Fi, supports high-resolution streaming, and works with the unified JBL One app for seamless grouping and room management.

The JBL Cove M1 serves as the entry point for the system. It’s a compact speaker that packs three tweeters, one woofer, and JBL’s AI Sound Boost technology to keep distortion to a minimum even at higher volumes. The Cove P1 is a more versatile pick that brings portability with a battery-powered design. It offers up to 14 hours of playback on a single charge and adds native support for Dolby Atmos playback, making it ideal for moving room-to-room or taking to the patio.

The JBL Cove X1 sits at the top of the range and is engineered to fill larger open spaces. It packs four tweeters, dual woofers, and Dolby Atmos support, and delivers the biggest acoustic footprint in the new lineup. All three models work standalone and can be grouped for a multi-room setup. The Cove lineup also features self-tuning to optimize acoustics based on room placement, and they can double as wireless rear surround speakers when paired with JBL MK2 series soundbars.

On the smart home front, JBL has confirmed that the Cove lineup will receive support for built-in voice controls powered by Amazon’s Alexa+ assistant via an over-the-air update in the US later this year.

Pricing and availability

JBL has positioned the Cove system aggressively against established market players, offering all three models at competitive prices. The Cove M1 comes at $230, the Cove P1 jumps to $400, and the top-of-the-line Cove X1 is priced at $450. All models will be available in black and white color options starting September 13 in the US.

If you are currently mapping out a multi-room audio setup or deciding which brand fits your living space, take a look at our breakdown of the best wireless speakers to see how JBL’s Cove lineup stacks up against the competition.

If you were planning to get the streaming device, you may want to head to Amazon right now.

Proposed redundancies are expected to take place between 7 and 21 October.

PayPal is laying off 164 of its Ireland-based workers in a now familiar Big Tech move to “simplify” company operations for long-term growth.

The layoffs represent 11.9pc of PayPal’s total full-time Irish workforce of 1,380 and includes both remote workers and on-site employees.

PayPal told Sinn Féin TD Ruairí Ó Murchú that the job cuts are part of a strategy announced earlier this year that aims to improve company operations by removing duplication and putting in place clearer reporting lines.

News of the redundancies was revealed yesterday (31 August) after 29 senior members of the staff, three team leaders and one manager were told they were being made redundant. The company later said that a further 131 employees, across a range of departments, would be laid off as well.

The Department of Enterprise said it received a collective redundancy notification from PayPal on 28 August, a legal requirement if a big business is considering laying off 30 or more employees. The proposed redundancies are expected to take place between 7 and 21 October, the fintech told Ó Murchú.

The layoffs come just after talks of Stripe jointly acquiring the once fintech giant for $53bn reportedly fell through. According to the tech job cuts tracker Layoffs.fyi, the latest redundancies take PayPal’s total layoffs since 2022 to more than 4,800.

PayPal has struggled in recent years to modernise against emerging rivals in the payments space, including Apple, Google and Stripe.

The fintech brought in HP’s Enrique Lores as its new CEO earlier this year, replacing Alex Chriss, whose work was apparently “not in line” with board expectations. But by June, PayPal had reportedly planned to shut down its venture capital arm.

PayPal’s shares have dropped dramatically over recent years as a result of the turbulent times at the company, but picked up after promising reports of a takeover by Stripe, which took its market capitalisation to $52.5bn just days ago, up from roughly $43bn in February, before dropping down to around $45bn today (1 September).

Last month, payments giant Visa cut roughly 2,600 employees, or about 7pc of its workforce in a pivot towards AI, and Etsy cut 12pc of its workforce for “flatter, faster teams”.

Medtech giant Boston Scientific said it is planning layoffs in Ireland, while 52 Ireland-based positions are expected to be cut at the Dublin-based automotive software provider Cubic3.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Small loudspeakers have become considerably better at delivering convincing bass, but physics remains undefeated. DALI thinks the answer does not have to involve adding a large black box to the corner of the room.

The Danish loudspeaker manufacturer has introduced the DALI BASIK SUB, a compact active subwoofer designed to add greater low-frequency extension, scale, and impact to smaller music and home theater systems. Developed as a natural partner for compact bookshelf loudspeakers including the DALI KUPID and SONIK 1, the BASIK SUB combines an in-house designed 8-inch down-firing long-stroke woofer with Class D amplification, flexible system integration, and five finish options.

DALI is also entering an increasingly competitive part of the subwoofer market. SVS, KEF, Bluesound, REL, and others have been putting considerable engineering effort into extracting deeper and cleaner bass from smaller enclosures, giving apartment dwellers, desktop listeners, and owners of compact two-channel systems far more options than they had even a few years ago.

The BASIK SUB therefore has to do more than simply make a pair of small DALI loudspeakers sound larger. Its compact dimensions, down-firing driver, and unusually broad choice of colors suggest DALI is also targeting listeners who want meaningful bass extension without allowing the subwoofer to become the largest and least attractive piece of furniture in the room.

“We’ve seen a rise in popularity of bookshelf speakers with our own award-winning KUPID and SONIK 1 speakers over the last year. This has been fueled by small, affordable streaming amplifiers and turntables which allow consumers to create a custom hi-fi system for the price of a smartphone. BASIK SUB is designed as a natural enhancement for these systems as almost all affordable streaming amplifiers and speakers feature dedicated subwoofer output and bass management features, making it possible to get the full scale and bandwidth from a compact and interior-friendly package,” says Krestian Pedersen, Head of Product Management at DALI.

8-Inch Woofer and 220 Watts of Class D Power

The BASIK SUB was developed in-house around an 8-inch down-firing, long-stroke woofer with a paper-pulp cone designed to combine low mass with rigidity for detailed low-frequency reproduction. An oversized ferrite magnet and high-flux motor system provide greater driver control, while a long, vented voice coil helps dissipate heat and reduce compression at higher listening levels. The down-firing configuration is also designed to promote more even bass distribution while providing greater flexibility with room placement.

The woofer is powered by an efficient Class D amplifier rated at 170 watts RMS and up to 220 watts peak. A switch-mode power supply helps reduce power consumption and heat generation, while a built-in dual-stage limiter is designed to protect against overload without unnecessarily compromising the signal. Gain, crossover, and phase controls provide the necessary adjustment for integrating the BASIK SUB with a wide range of stereo and home theater systems.

Compact Cabinet With Five Finish Options

The BASIK SUB uses a compact MDF enclosure available in Solid Black, Solid White, Caramel White, Golden Yellow, and Chilly Blue, allowing it to coordinate visually with DALI’s KUPID and SONIK compact loudspeakers.

The MDF construction provides a rigid, acoustically stable foundation for the driver, while four decoupled feet elevate the cabinet by 25 mm. This helps reduce unwanted vibration and provides the necessary clearance for the down-firing woofer.

Its compact footprint makes the BASIK SUB easier to accommodate in smaller living spaces, with placement options alongside a wall or in a corner. It is designed for both two-channel music systems and more modest multi-channel home theater setups where a larger subwoofer may be impractical.

DALI says the BASIK SUB has been engineered according to the company’s established sound-design principles, with an emphasis on clean, low-distortion bass and accurate timing.

Flexible Bass Management and System Integration

The BASIK SUB provides an adjustable crossover that allows it to be matched to different loudspeaker sizes and room acoustics when the connected amplifier does not provide its own bass management or dedicated subwoofer controls.

A continuously adjustable 0-180° phase control helps align the subwoofer’s low-frequency output with the main loudspeakers, while an independent volume control allows for final level adjustments.

Stereo LINE L/R inputs accommodate conventional two-channel hi-fi systems, while a dedicated mono LFE input provides straightforward connectivity with AV receivers, home theater systems, and streaming amplifiers equipped with a subwoofer output.

DALI BASIK SUB Specifications

The Bottom Line 

The DALI BASIK SUB is not trying to be the subwoofer that rattles the dishes three rooms away. With an 8-inch down-firing woofer, 170 watts of RMS power, and a published low-frequency response down to 40 Hz, its priorities appear to be integration, musical balance, compact dimensions, and ease of placement.

That makes the BASIK SUB best suited to smaller two-channel systems built around bookshelf loudspeakers, particularly DALI’s own KUPID and SONIK 1, as well as compact streaming amplifiers with proper bass management. It should also make sense in apartments, bedrooms, offices, and modest home theater systems where extending the bottom end is more important than reproducing subterranean movie effects.

The competition at $800 is not exactly asleep. The REL T/5x ($799) also uses an 8-inch down-firing driver and is strongly focused on music systems, while the KEF Kube 8 MIE ($699.99) offers an 8-inch driver, 300-watt Class D amplifier, DSP, and deeper published bass extension for less money.

What makes the BASIK SUB different is its emphasis on design as much as performance. Five color options, compact dimensions, and finishes intended to coordinate with DALI’s smaller loudspeakers make it considerably less anonymous than the black and white boxes that dominate the category.

Whether that is enough to justify $800 will depend on how well it performs, especially with competitors offering deeper published extension at the same price or less. But for listeners assembling a compact 2.1-channel system who want better bass without turning the room into a subwoofer showroom, the BASIK SUB has a clear purpose.

And if Chilly Blue or Golden Yellow finally solves the spousal acceptance problem, DALI may have accomplished something decades of subwoofer engineering could not.

Price & Availability

The DALI BASIK is available through Authorized DALI Dealers for $800 in the U.S. and at £429 and €500 across Europe.

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Prominent solo investor Lachy Groom has backed a Bengaluru startup attempting an ambitious feat: keeping an aircraft in the sky for more than a year by harvesting energy from ocean winds.

Alteon, founded by 20-year-old Samay Sanghvi, announced Tuesday that it raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Groom, with participation from Together Fund, to develop autonomous aircraft inspired by dynamic soaring, a technique albatrosses use to extract energy from the wind. Groom decided he wanted to invest within the first 30 minutes of their first meeting, Sanghvi told TechCrunch.

Conventional aircraft need to carry the fuel or battery power required for a flight. Alteon is trying to break that limitation by designing its small, fixed-wing autonomous aircraft that can extract energy from wind shear above the ocean through dynamic soaring — a maneuver in which an aircraft repeatedly moves between layers of air traveling at different speeds.

“Once you build airplanes that can stay in the air for more than a year, there are millions of things you can do with them,” Sanghvi told TechCrunch. Alteon plans to initially use the aircraft for maritime surveillance, giving governments real-time visibility into activity in their waters.

The initial plan is to build an aircraft with around a three-meter-wingspan that will fly close to the ocean’s surface, climb, and turn through faster-moving air, and repeat the cycle to gain energy from the wind. Eventually, Alteon plans to use its propellers as turbines to convert some of that energy into electricity and recharge its onboard batteries, Sanghvi said.

However, the startup has not yet demonstrated that its aircraft can actually sustain flight using energy harvested through dynamic soaring. It did complete a recent of its test of its autonomous flight system over the Bay of Bengal in which the aircraft autonomously completed seven O-shaped cycles at more than 62 miles per hour, flying within one meter of the water’s surface.

Alteon’s next major milestone will be what Sanghvi calls “energy-neutral dynamic soaring.” This would allow the aircraft to fly continuously with its propulsion switched off, extracting enough energy from the wind to remain aloft.

Dr. Gabriel Bousquet, a Silicon Valley-based aerospace and robotics engineer who researched dynamic soaring during his PhD at MIT, called Alteon’s low-altitude flight over water a “promising first result.” But he noted that the harder challenge will be proving that the aircraft can reliably extract enough energy from real-world winds to sustain flight for extended periods.

Flying low enough to harvest that energy safely is particularly difficult, Bousquet told TechCrunch, as the aircraft would have to contend with turbulence, waves, spray, rain, and changing light conditions while continuously sensing and reacting to a moving ocean surface.

Dr. Bharath Swaminathan, who earned his PhD from IIT Madras studying the stability of dynamic soaring, said the underlying physics is well established and called Alteon’s effort commendable. Keeping an aircraft airborne for several days using dynamic soaring would itself be “a very big step, and a big achievement,” he told TechCrunch.

Swaminathan, however, added that while large-scale wind conditions may be predictable, local wind shear and turbulence can vary substantially, complicating an aircraft’s ability to continuously extract energy from the wind. Some of those challenges, he suggested, may only emerge through real-world flight testing.

Groom acknowledged the technical risk behind the bet. “Ambitious problems are always going to come with risks,” he told TechCrunch. “For me, it came down to believing Samay and the Alteon team are the ones to figure them out.”

Sanghvi began working on what would become Alteon straight out of high school in 2023, learning to build aircraft by making — and crashing — radio-controlled models before developing early prototypes. He formally founded Alteon in 2025 and received early backing from Emergent Ventures and 1517.

Alteon now has a team of 20 in Bengaluru and operates from a 10,000-square-foot facility. The startup is building four to five aircraft a week for testing and has conducted more than 200 test flights in the past 30 days, Sanghvi said.