The hardest targets in the sky are the ones you cannot see — stealth-shaped, radar-quiet, or deliberately spoofed. Conventional radar has an answer for none of these at once. In Chennai, a defence deeptech startup is betting the answer lies in entangled photons.
The company is Big Bang Boom Solutions (BBBS), and on 12 October 2026 it organised QuantEW 2026 — a workshop on quantum technologies for electronic warfare — inside the official technical programme of IEEE MILCOM 2026, held in the Washington, DC area. In the opening keynote, co-founder and CTO Dr Shivaraman Ramaswamy unveiled the company’s plan to build a sovereign quantum radar, backed by a technology assessment and development roadmap, the company announced on 15 October.
Quantum illumination: the physics case
The keynote centred on quantum illumination radar — a technique that uses entangled signal and idler photons to pick out low-observable targets against strong background noise. Where conventional radar is limited by stealth shaping, thermal noise and spoofing from digital radio-frequency memory (DRFM) jammers, theory shows quantum illumination can deliver a significant advantage in the detection error exponent over the best classical scheme using the same transmitted energy, the company says. The advantage applies in the low-signal, high-noise regime — exactly where conventional sensors struggle most.
From battle-proven hardware to a moonshot
The quantum radar is not starting from a blank slate. BBBS was founded in 2018 by Praveen Dwarakanath and Shivaraman Ramaswamy, and its flagship Vajra Sentinel anti-drone system won a contract worth over ₹200 crore from the Indian Air Force and the Indian Army in 2024 — one of the largest Ministry of Defence contracts ever signed with an Indian startup, awarded under the iDEX initiative. The system combines AI-fingerprinting-based passive RF detection with soft-kill jamming and interceptor-drone hard kills, with detection ranges up to 10 km, and its sensor-and-jammer units are built to MIL-STD-810G durability standards.
Beyond counter-drone work, the company’s portfolio includes Yudhikshana (AI-assisted 360-degree vision for armoured fighting vehicles), the AGNI QUELL fluorine-free firefighting foam, the Aqua Tether non-lethal naval deterrent, and a thermal-intervention caged drone for GPS-denied environments — developed across a 20,000 sq ft SHAKTI R&D hub in Chennai, with eight iDEX project wins to its name.
The hard parts, stated plainly
BBBS is not claiming a quantum radar exists yet — it places its programme at technology readiness level (TRL) 3 and targets TRL 4–5 in about 24 months, with platform-mounted demonstrators and an operational prototype as longer-term goals. The keynote was honest about the gap: no field-deployable quantum radar exists anywhere today, and cryogenic requirements remain a critical barrier. The company says its roadmap is supported by India’s National Quantum Mission, and it is inviting collaboration with academia, government laboratories and industry on the open research problems it has laid out.
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A young Indian company organising a peer-reviewed quantum-electronic-warfare forum inside one of the world’s leading military-communications conferences — and putting a sovereign radar roadmap on the table — is itself the signal. Whether the physics scales from lab to battlefield is an open question; that it is being asked from Chennai, with hardware already deployed on the front line, is what makes it worth watching.
