Start-up by IIT-Bombay alumni bags deal to supply drones to Indian Army

A start-up founded and incubated by the alumni of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, has grabbed a deal to build and supply advanced tactical drones worth ₹130 crore to the Indian Army.

This is reportedly the biggest such order, in terms of the contract value, for any Indian equipment manufacturer of drones.

ideaForge beat top Israeli and Indian drone manufacturers to bag the coveted contract. The firm will be providing an undisclosed number of drones that can operate at higher altitudes to the armed forces, the company has announced in a statement.

A high-altitude variant of ideaForge’s Switch UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) will be delivered over a period of a year, the statement read.

Sanjay Jaju, joint secretary to Government of India in the department of defence production, tweeted a congratulatory message to the start-up.

The features of this advanced high-altitude version of SWITCH UAV include vertical take-off and landing, advanced flight time with a range of 15km, higher safety and simple operations with additional fail-safe redundancies. These are used for long-duration operations in harsh environments for day and night surveillance on Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions.

ideaForge was incubated in 2007 at the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), IIT Bombay, by four alumni — Ankit Mehta, Rahul Singh, Ashish Bhat and Vipul Joshi. Starting off by building hand-cranked chargers, the enterprise soon shifted to building a hovercraft and eventually entered the drone manufacturing market. The company is a licensed manufacturer of UAVs approved by the ministry of defence.

Based in Mumbai, the company offers seven UAVs used in a range of applications, including mapping, traffic management, surveillance, crowd management and security. Some of these drones are already in use by the armed forces.