Image credit: Scandron official website — the CargoMax 20KHC heavy-lift drone in flight.
Getting supplies to an Indian Army post in the high Himalayas has always been a problem of altitude, weather and weight. Roads close, helicopters are scarce and expensive, and mules can only carry so much. A Bengaluru startup called Scandron is building a different answer: heavy-lift drones that fly themselves over mountain passes, carrying loads that used to need a convoy — and the Indian Army has already put them to the test at 18,000 feet.
Scandron was founded in 2022 by Arjun Naik, Sanjeev Bhandari and Rana Rajvinder Singh, and is based in Bengaluru with offices in Leh, Noida and Hyderabad. Naik has worked in Indian drones since 2007, and the company he built now designs, manufactures and operates its own unmanned aircraft — logistics drones, agricultural drones, surveillance platforms and custom systems — with a team of more than 30 professionals. In March 2023, listed company Magellanic Cloud took a majority stake in Scandron, and the startup has since become the heavy-lift arm of the group.
The 200-kilo flagship
The headline machine is the CargoMax 20KHC, unveiled at Aero India 2025 in Bengaluru. The company calls it India’s most powerful cargo drone, and the numbers explain why: the company says it can carry 200 kg at sea level and 120 kg at high altitude, over a 15 km operational range, up to a ceiling of 6,000 metres above mean sea level. It flies fully autonomously — pilotless operations, with a common command-and-control architecture and redundancy layers across the CargoMax family.
The 20KHC is built for the hardest logistics in the country: high-altitude Army supply runs, desert operations and naval work, where the company says it can make pinpoint landings on moving platforms. “We have completely developed this in India and do not procure products from anywhere abroad,” Arjun Naik said at the launch. The drone was pitched first to the Indian armed forces, and the company has set up a manufacturing facility in Ladakh to build close to its defence customers.
First over the pass
Before the 200-kilo flagship, Scandron had already proved itself where the air is thinnest. At HIM-DRONE-A-THON 2 in September 2024 — the Indian Army’s high-altitude drone challenge at Wari La in Ladakh, organised with FICCI — Scandron took first place in the High-Altitude Logistics category. Its CargoMax 4000Q took off from 15,400 feet carrying 20 kg, climbed to 18,000 feet, crossed the Wari La Pass, landed at a remote location and flew back to base. The drone was then evaluated by the Army for logistics deliveries to forward locations.
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That flight is the heart of Scandron’s story. A logistics drone is only useful if it works where the roads end, and the company’s machines are designed around exactly that test: thin air, freezing wind and no room for error, carrying real weight to a real destination and coming home again.
Certified first
Scandron holds a distinction no other Indian company has: in February 2024, its CargoMax 500HE became the first logistics drone in India to receive DGCA type certification. The certification, granted under the DGCA’s certification scheme for unmanned aircraft systems, covers the safety, security and reliability of the aircraft — and the company says it remains the only Indian manufacturer with type certification for a logistics drone.
The certification unlocked the commercial side of the business. Scandron partnered with CriticaLog India to offer business-to-business and hub-to-hub drone delivery across 160 Indian cities, aimed at healthcare, e-commerce and critical supplies. The company also runs a drone operations Command and Control Centre in Bengaluru, from which it monitors its drone operations across India, and its agricultural drone, the SNDAG010QX8, has also received DGCA type certification.
A family, not a single drone
The CargoMax range runs from compact 5 kg platforms to the 200 kg flagship, with variants tuned for high-altitude, desert and naval operations. At Aero India 2025 the company also showed the SkyKrane 40 aerial crane and its ScanD suite of surveillance drones, and its newer lineup adds long-endurance surveillance, unmanned combat aerial vehicles and sensor payloads — ground-penetrating radar, gas detection, magnetometers and bathymetric surveying — all built on the same engineering base.
Scandron’s drones are already at work beyond the defence world: the company says its platforms serve the Indian armed forces as well as oil and gas and power generation customers, with industrial clients including Tata Steel, Indian Oil, Reliance, Bharat Electronics and Bharat Petroleum. “Scandron is a customer-focused company, and we continuously innovate to design and develop disruptive drone solutions to help solve real-world problems and bring enhanced efficiency to our customers’ operations,” Naik said at Aero India 2025.
From a 2022 Bengaluru startup to a 200-kilo lifter flying itself over an 18,000-foot pass, Scandron has done the hard part of Indian deep tech: it built the machine, won the certification, and proved it where it matters most — in the thin air above Ladakh, carrying weight that once needed a convoy.
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