ideaForge boosts India's drone sector with focus on tech indigenisation

ideaForge has the largest operational deployment of indigenous UAVs across India, with an ideaForge-manufactured drone taking off every five minutes on average for surveillance and mapping

Do you remember the drone scene in the 2009 critically acclaimed movie 3 Idiots? The unmanned aerial vehicle featured in the film was developed by an unknown firm at that time called ideaForge.

 

“The drone in the movie 3 Idiots was an early prototype of ours,” said Ankit Mehta, chief executive officer of ideaForge.

 

Mehta co-founded the company in 2007 along with Rahul Singh and Ashish Bhat. Another co-founder, Vipul Joshi, later joined the company. The founding team had designed their first quadcopter UAV in 2004 while studying at IIT Bombay.

 

“In 2008, when the attacks in Mumbai happened, we decided that we should take all of this and make a product for our forces,” said Mehta.

 

A lot has changed since then. ideaForge has become a leading vertically integrated company that designs, develops, engineers, and manufactures UAVs in-house.

 

The company serves domestic and international customers in the defence and civil sectors, primarily for surveillance, mapping, and surveying applications.

 

These customers include Indian defence forces, state police, forest departments, as well as private contractors and enterprises.

 

The firm has the largest operational deployment of indigenous UAVs across India, with an ideaForge-manufactured drone taking off every five minutes on average for surveillance and mapping. As of today, its customers have completed over 550,000 flights using the UAVs.

 

The UAVs are equipped with AI-based image intelligence, which helps in ‘people detection’ and ‘target tracking’. Beyond the UAVs and Ground Control Station (GCS) software that allows users to control and monitor unmanned vehicles (UVs), the firm has also built proprietary solutions. One such solution is ‘BlueFire Live!’, which enables encrypted live streaming of the UAV video feed and also allows payload control from a remote command location.

 

Such innovations are helping the firm to provide civil and defence applications. For instance, ideaForge’s Q4i and Q6 UAVs were used in a search and rescue operation during extreme floods in Andhra Pradesh in September. During the operation, the drones covered a flying range of approximately 4 to 4.3 km, helping to identify remote areas where individuals were stranded, assess flooding breakpoints, and monitor the progress of ongoing construction work.

 

The company’s ‘BlueFire Live!’ streaming service also enabled authorities to monitor operations in real time. This allowed them to make prompt decisions to effectively address the situation.

 

The firm’s drones were also deployed this year to address Uttarakhand forest fires. There, they played a crucial role in detecting and tracking fires using innovative ‘smart forest solution and full-motion video’ (FMV) solutions in ArcGIS, a leading geographic information system (GIS) technology. With human intervention guided by ideaForge’s technology, specific fire spots were successfully located and extinguished, contributing to the broader firefighting efforts.

 

India’s ambition of becoming a ‘drone hub’ 

India aims to become a global drone hub by 2030, supported by liberalised regulations and incentives, presenting opportunities for companies like ideaForge. The drone and its components industry can significantly strengthen India's manufacturing potential to approximately $23 billion by 2030, according to the EY-Ficci report titled ‘Making India the drone hub of the world’. Making India a drone manufacturing power would not only contribute to the country’s target of a $5 trillion economy but would also largely support the Make in India mission, with its success contributing to national prosperity across multiple sectors.

 

Mehta said the Covid-19 pandemic was an ‘inflection point’ for the drone industry as the overall regulations and incentives related to this space improved.

 

The government has realised that drones offer vast benefits across sectors like agriculture, healthcare, disaster relief, surveillance, and defence.

 

For instance, as part of the government’s Digital Bharat campaign, the Ministry of Panchayat Raj also launched an ambitious scheme of mapping 660,000 villages in India through drones under the ‘SVAMITVA’ scheme. It entails 100 per cent digitisation of land records in India. Mehta said ideaForge played a key role in mapping these villages.

 

Mehta said the global geopolitical situation, such as the Russia-Ukraine war and the 2020–2021 China-India skirmishes on the border, also gave the country many reasons to ensure it is not lacking in drone capabilities. “It's been a fairly useful and productive last four years for the drone industry,” he said. “We've ensured that none of the intelligent components that we use are coming from either an OEM or manufacturing location in China. That ensures we are away from the typical threats that can arise from supply chain issues. Also, the software is ours. That, again, gives much more confidence to the end user.”

 

ideaForge’s multinational operations 

Besides India, ideaForge currently has operations in Bhutan, Nigeria, and the US. The firm is also intensifying efforts to enable exports to North America and other key regions. The focus remains on developing new technology to meet evolving customer needs, maximising revenue across all channels, and expanding its global presence.

 

The company went public last year, and its initial public offering (IPO) was subscribed by 106 times in June 2023.

 

The firm has been backed by top investors such as Qualcomm, Infosys, Celesta Capital, Florintree, Exim Bank, Infina Finance, and other prominent institutional investors.

 

The company reported a net loss of Rs 13.72 crore in Q2 FY25 as compared with a net profit of Rs 0.89 crore in Q2 FY24. Revenue from operations increased 56.34 per cent year-over-year to Rs 37.10 crore in Q2 FY25. The pre-tax loss stood at Rs 17.99 crore during the quarter, compared with a pre-tax profit of Rs 1.33 crore in Q2 FY24.

 

The firm reported negative Ebitda of Rs 99.9 crore in Q2 FY25 compared with positive Ebitda of Rs 70.5 crore posted in the same quarter last year. Ebitda margins declined 26.9 per cent in Q2 FY25 compared with 29.7 per cent in Q2 FY24.

 

However, Mehta remains optimistic. In a recent statement, he said the company’s long-term efforts of pushing indigenisation and eliminating the use of critical sub-systems from geographies of concern are bearing fruit. He said customers are actively considering looking under the hood to ensure there are no vulnerabilities due to the country of origin.

 

The company filed six new patents in this quarter, and two of the patents were granted, taking the global portfolio to 78 patents.

 

“On the international front, due to our increased presence in the US, we are also witnessing interest in our products and solutions from across the globe, and we are working diligently on these opportunities.”