In August 2018, Kerala’s worst floods in a century swept away farmland topsoil across the state, leaving farmers staring at fields that would take years to recover. In Cherthala, in Alappuzha district, a brother and sister watched it happen — and asked a different question from everyone else. What if a drone could do the work of rebuilding a farm, acre by acre, from the air? Six years later, the company they founded in 2020, Fuselage Innovations, builds DGCA-certified agricultural drones in Kochi, serves more than 8,000 farmers, and has delivered a custom drone to the Defence Research and Development Organisation’s naval laboratory.
Fuselage Innovations was founded by siblings Devan Chandrasekharan, an aeronautical engineer who is the company’s founder and managing director, and Devika Chandrasekharan, an electronics engineer and director. The company is based at Maker Village, in the Kerala Technology Innovation Zone at Kalamassery, Kochi, and its story runs on a simple idea: the technology that helps a farmer spray a paddy field precisely can also carry a payload for a navy shipyard — if the engineering is genuinely your own.
Two drones, built almost entirely in-house
Fuselage Innovations makes two drones, and both carry DGCA type certification. The FIA QD10 is a precision spraying drone with a 10-litre tank that the company says can cover an acre in about eight minutes, putting pesticide or fertiliser exactly where the crop needs it instead of across the whole field. The Nireeksh is a multispectral surveillance drone that reads a field in red, red-edge, near-infrared, infrared, RGB and thermal — spotting pest attacks and nutrient stress before a farmer’s eye can — and feeds what it sees into a farm-management software platform.
Fuselage Innovations’ FIA QD10 precision spraying drone. (Image: Fuselage Innovations)
What sets the company apart is how much of the machine it builds itself. The airframes, power distribution boards, CAN boards, propellers, tanks and software are all developed in-house — the company says about 60 per cent of each drone is built by its own team, with about 30 per cent outsourced and only around 10 per cent of critical aeronautical-grade components imported. The full product design is patented. That in-house depth is what lets the company build customised drones for other industries too, alongside its Drone Fleet Management System — and it is what won it a defence contract. The company runs a monthly manufacturing capacity of 250 drones and had sold about 160 by September 2024, averaging around 50 a month.
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From the paddy to the naval dockyard
The farm numbers tell the story first. A NITI Aayog Frontier Tech Hub case study records 8,400 farmers using Fuselage Innovations’ drones across 4,100 hectares, with yields up 25 to 35 per cent and fertiliser use down 75 per cent, at a service cost of Rs 2,000 to 5,000 per acre. For smallholders, that is the difference between spraying by hand — slow, uneven, and a health risk — and a machine that does the same acre in minutes, with a fraction of the chemical.
Then came the call from the sea. Fuselage Innovations won a competitive tender to build a custom drone for the Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory (NPOL) in Kochi, the DRDO laboratory that works on underwater sensors and naval systems. The drone carries a payload of up to 20 kilograms for maritime logistics and inspection work, and was handed over after trials. It is the same engineering — airframe, power systems, flight control — pointed at a completely different customer, and it shows what an agricultural drone company can become when it owns its technology end to end.
Fuselage Innovations’ drones at work on precision farming in Kerala. (Video: Fuselage Innovations)
Recognition, at home and abroad
The work has drawn national recognition. In January 2026, Fuselage Innovations won the Aspire Award at the National Startup Awards 5.0, presented by Minister Piyush Goyal in New Delhi. Devan Chandrasekharan was named to the Forbes India 30 Under 30 list for 2025 in agritech, and to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list for 2026. The company is a NASSCOM Emerge 50 winner from 2023, won the Hitachi National Innovation Challenge with a Rs 30 lakh prize, was selected for the UK Government’s Global Entrepreneurship Programme, won the AgriTech4 Innovation Challenge in Tashkent, and received a Rs 30 lakh grant from IIMK LIVE and Cochin Shipyard. In December 2024, it travelled to Slush in Helsinki as part of an India–Finland delegation.
Fuselage Innovations’ spraying drone at work over a Kerala field. (Image: Fuselage Innovations)
The company says its turnover has reached Rs 5 crore, with a team of 35 people in Kochi and a Canada arm, Fuselage Innovations Inc., in Toronto. It is a grants-and-revenue story rather than a venture-funded one — built on paying farmers and paying customers, not on a funding announcement. From flooded fields in Alappuzha to a naval laboratory in Kochi, two siblings have shown that the same drone can feed a farm and serve a fleet — and that Indian engineering, built in-house and proven in the field, travels further than anyone expected.
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