On the night of October 18, a giant peacock spread its glowing feathers over Mysuru and began to dance. It was not a bird at all — it was 3,473 synchronised drones rising together above the Torchlight Parade Ground in Bannimantap, and by the time the lights faded, India had a new Guinness World Records title: the largest aerial display of a bird formed by multirotors or drones.
The flying peacock was the centrepiece of the Mysuru Dasara drone show, organised by the Chamundeshwari Electricity Supply Corporation Limited (CESC). Across a twenty-minute programme, the swarm also traced a butterfly, a lion, the Chakra, Lord Krishna, the solar system, Goddess Chamundeshwari and a soldier raising the Tricolour — a moving canvas of light that drew more than 40,000 people to the venue, with thousands more watching from rooftops and terraces across the city. Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar shared videos of the display on X, calling it a celebration of the state’s creativity, culture and spirit of progress.
The company behind the spectacle is BotLab Dynamics, an IIT-Delhi-incubated deep-tech startup founded in 2016 by Tanmay Bunkar, Anuj Kumar Barnwal and Dr Sarita Ahlawat, who serves as co-founder and managing director. Incorporated at IIT Delhi’s Technology Business Incubation Unit, the team began with an uncompromising conviction: India needed drone technology that was conceived, designed and built here, not assembled from imported parts. After field tests in harsh desert conditions at Pokhran exposed the limits of hobby-grade hardware, the company rebuilt its entire stack from scratch — designing its own flight controllers, motor controllers, RTK GPS systems and radio receivers, and tuning them tightly to its in-house swarm algorithms.
That indigenisation is what makes each show possible at this scale. Every drone in a BotLab swarm flies a flight plan converted from digital animation — a process that runs each frame through collision-avoidance simulations accounting for wind and airspeed before a single aircraft leaves the ground. With more than 10,000 drones in its fleet and over 700 shows delivered worldwide, the company has turned swarm control into a repeatable engineering discipline. The results have stacked up: a 1,000-drone display at the Beating Retreat ceremony in 2022, five Guinness World Records in a single 5,500-drone show at the Amaravati Drone Summit in 2024, a 2,983-drone tiger at Mysuru Dasara 2025, and a Lord Shiva-themed show at the IPL 2026 final watched by 3.4 crore viewers.
BotLab Dynamics’ ambitions extend well beyond entertainment. Its defence vertical, Vayudh, develops swarm and surveillance platforms for the armed forces — the founding team’s original mission — and its BotLab Store supplies locally developed, rigorously tested drone components to empower India’s next generation of drone builders. From a dorm room at IIT Delhi to eight world records, the company has made India’s skies its proving ground — and its showcase.
Here’s the company’s own showreel of what a BotLab swarm can do:
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