The last mile of guidance, built into the weapon itself
Most guided weapons lean on something outside themselves to find their target — a designator, a datalink, a signal from the launch platform. Optimized Electrotech, an Ahmedabad deep-tech company, has built a system that changes that equation: a miniature visual guidance system that lets an airborne guided projectile see, recognise and track its target with its own onboard eyes.
The company calls it MVIGS, the Miniature Visual Guidance System. Developed under the Defence Ministry’s Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) framework, it is intended for integration with next-generation guided weapon systems manufactured by Bharat Dynamics Limited, and the company says it has advanced through prototype validation and trials toward a deployment-ready capability.
An eye, a brain, and a steady hand — in one small package
MVIGS packs five disciplines into a miniature package: electro-optics, image acquisition, onboard image interpretation, embedded electronics and edge analytics. The system takes visual inputs cued by the launch platform, detects and recognises targets, and classifies them using onboard edge processing — all during flight, without waiting on an external feed.
The company says the system also supports flight-path error correction through platform communication, using visual information and other guidance inputs to keep the weapon on its trajectory. In practice, that means the guidance loop closes onboard: the projectile is not just following instructions, it is watching where it is going.
MVIGS was developed with Forge Innovation & Ventures through its Forge4Fauj programme, and the company says the system complies with JSS 55555, the military standard for environmental testing of electronic equipment.
A company built on owning the whole imaging stack
MVIGS is the newest branch of a much larger tree. Optimized Electrotech was founded in 2017 by Sandeep Shah and Dharin Shah, alongside Anil Yekkala, Kuldeep Saxena and Purvi Shah. Sandeep Shah spent over two decades working on detector characterisation systems for ISRO, contributing to Cartosat, Chandrayaan and Mangalyaan and to the signal monitoring facility for India’s IRNSS navigation system. Dharin Shah brings over two decades in semiconductors and system design, including a stint at Texas Instruments and multiple patents.
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Their founding bet was that India should own the entire electro-optical stack — sensors, precision optics, embedded electronics and the AI models on top — rather than assembling imported components. That bet now spans more than 20 products across the company’s Vision, Eye, Sight and Ardis series, unified by OSIGHT, its indigenous, hardware-agnostic software platform.
The company’s systems are deployed with the Indian Army, the Indian Navy, ISRO, the Gujarat Police and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, as well as defence public sector undertakings including Bharat Dynamics, Bharat Electronics and India Optel, and L&T Defence. It is, the company says, the only Indian startup to have won all three iDEX challenges — DISC, Open Challenge and ADITI.
Seeing farther, through fog and darkness
The same imaging stack behind MVIGS powers the company’s long-range surveillance systems. Its InfiVISION system, a ruggedised electro-optic surveillance platform, offers a 1300 mm equivalent focal length, 5.5-megapixel imaging at 33 frames per second, 360-degree continuous pan and nine hours of full-frame high-definition recording, detecting people from 5 kilometres and vehicles from farther still.
Across its portfolio, the company’s systems work from 400 nanometres to 12 microns of the electromagnetic spectrum — visible light through long-wave infrared. Its MistVision series sees through fog on short-wave infrared, its NoctVision series watches through complete darkness, and its ClearVision series covers visible, near-infrared and mid-wave infrared for all-weather surveillance. The company’s first product line, the InfiVision series, is designed to detect a tank at more than 30 kilometres.
That breadth is what makes MVIGS possible: a guidance system is only as good as the imaging behind it, and Optimized Electrotech spent nine years building that imaging, in-house, in Ahmedabad and at its Bengaluru prototype development facility, which houses an ISO Class 7 clean room. Its Defence Industrial Licence also enables it to export its military-grade products.
From surveillance to the seeker
MVIGS marks a shift in what the company’s technology does. For years its systems watched borders, coastlines, airports and critical infrastructure, and told a human operator what they saw. Now the same stack — the optics, the edge AI, the classification running in milliseconds — rides inside the weapon itself, turning surveillance into guidance.
It is a fitting next step for a company whose mission has always been self-reliance in a field long dominated by global giants. India has long imported its electro-optics; Optimized Electrotech is building them at home, and now putting them where they matter most — in the final, decisive seconds of a guided weapon’s flight.
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