Image credit: Frame from IZI’s official VANA introduction video.
There is a particular kind of flying that never makes headlines: slow, precise, patient flying, back and forth over the same ground, building a picture metre by metre. That is the flying Bhopal-based IZI Enterprise has built its VANA drone for — and now it is flying for one of India’s most demanding customers. The company has secured an order from the Defence Research and Development Organisation’s Proof & Experimental Establishment (PXE) for the supply and deployment of its IZI VANA surveillance drones.
PXE is the DRDO establishment that tests and evaluates defence systems and equipment, so the bar for anything it flies is high. Under the order, VANA will support aerial photogrammetry and precision mapping, terrain and ground-feature data collection, surveillance and aerial observation, and optical and thermal imaging, with real-time transmission of aerial video and mission data. The platform will also fly precision navigation and waypoint-based autonomous missions, logging flight and sensor data for post-mission analysis — the unglamorous, exacting work on which range testing and evaluation depend.
One airframe, configured for the mission
VANA stands for Versatile Aerial Navigation Asset, and the name is the design philosophy. The company says VANA is built around a single standardised core that adapts to different missions through configurable payloads, endurance profiles and range classes, without redesigning the airframe or retraining operators. From infrastructure inspection and large-scale mapping to agriculture monitoring and tactical surveillance, the idea is that one reliable system covers many roles.
For the DRDO order, the VANA platform is configured with high-resolution imaging, RGB and electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) sensing, GNSS navigation, onboard sensors and a dedicated Ground Control Station (GCS). Its mission architecture includes automated mission planning, geofencing, altitude and camera control, autonomous waypoint navigation and live data management through the GCS. The contract identifies the platform as an Aerial Photogrammetry Platform (Drones), with the model specified as the IZI VANA Surveillance Drone and India as the country of origin.
Built for hard places and contested airwaves
The company lists an operational range of up to 25 km, endurance of 30 to 90 minutes depending on payload and profile, and deployment in under five minutes in the field. Navigation runs on multi-constellation GNSS — GPS plus NavIC, Galileo and GLONASS — with RTK-enabled precision positioning for centimetre-level accuracy, and the company says VANA can navigate without GPS using vision and sensor fusion. Communications use AES-256 encryption over a secure long-range datalink, with frequency-hopping spread spectrum and an electronic-warfare-resilient architecture, plus a dual-band system and an in-house ground station built on the company’s own software stack.
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Payload options show how far the modular idea goes. The company says VANA’s Trinetra configuration combines electro-optical imaging, infrared thermal imaging and a laser rangefinder, with detection ranges of up to 2.4 km for vehicles and 800 metres for human movement. Other payload options include high-resolution RGB cameras for mapping and infrastructure inspection, thermal imaging for observation in low light, and multispectral sensors for agricultural and environmental data collection. The company also says VANA supports coordinated swarm operations through its in-house mesh-network communication architecture.
A Bhopal company, a defence-first arm
IZI Enterprise is the defence-first and industry-first arm of IZI, focused on developing indigenous aerial systems for defence, homeland security, critical infrastructure and strategic industrial applications. The company says its VANA ecosystem spans persistent surveillance, ISR, tactical reconnaissance and other mission-critical aerial applications. Founder Ishan Haydn said securing the order from DRDO’s Proof & Experimental Establishment is an important milestone for IZI and reflects its focus on developing indigenous unmanned systems for specialised government and defence applications.
As part of the engagement, IZI will provide two DGCA-certified pilots for the first year, supporting flight operations and helping transfer piloting capabilities to designated personnel during the warranty period — a small detail that says a lot about how the company works: the system arrives with the people who know how to fly it, and the knowledge stays behind when they leave.
The company has also been building the factory base to back orders like this one, with a ₹50 crore manufacturing expansion in Madhya Pradesh for consumer and industrial UAV systems. A drone that maps a range in the morning, inspects a power line in the afternoon and watches a border at night is not three products — it is one platform, made in Bhopal, earning its place in India’s defence ecosystem one mission at a time.
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