A drone that loses its satellite link is usually a drone that’s about to be lost. Modern unmanned aircraft navigate by GPS, and on a modern battlefield, GPS is the first thing the enemy takes away — jammed, spoofed, or drowned in electromagnetic noise. The aircraft that survives is the one that can keep flying when the sky goes silent.
A Hyderabad deep-tech startup is building the technology for exactly that moment. PhoQtek Labs does not build drones at all. It builds what goes inside them: indigenous navigation and autonomy systems designed to keep unmanned platforms on mission in GPS-denied, electronically contested airspace. The company’s bet is that India’s drone fleet doesn’t need to be replaced for a wartime scenario — it needs to be retrofitted.
GarudaNav: navigation that doesn’t phone home
PhoQtek’s flagship product is GarudaNav, a GPS-denied navigation system for aerial platforms — drones and aircraft — built around a sensor suite and a proprietary autonomy stack. Speaking to The New Indian Express, co-founder and CEO Gautham Nekkanti described the architecture in broad strokes: cameras onboard, aided by gyroscopes and inertial sensors, feeding a proprietary algorithm that can navigate and carry out fully autonomous operations when satellite positioning is unavailable.
The design philosophy is edge-first. Because an electronic-warfare environment can cut not just positioning but the control link itself, the drone cannot rely on a human operator to steer it through a jammed zone — it has to make its own decisions about how to execute the mission. PhoQtek’s approach puts AI-based mission reasoning and visual perception on the aircraft itself, running on onboard edge hardware the company says it integrates directly with existing flight-control stacks such as PX4 and ArduPilot.
The company’s stated focus is long-range work rather than short hops: its roadmap targets GPS-denied navigation missions from about 20 kilometres out to 100 kilometres, at baseline altitudes of 250 metres to one kilometre, aimed at applications including surveillance, high-altitude target detection, and loitering platforms.
A photonics bet: the indigenous fibre-optic gyroscope
The second product line is arguably the deeper moat. PhoQtek is developing a photonics-based fibre-optic gyroscope — a precision rotation sensor — aimed at land- and navy-based applications. The company’s reasoning is strategic: the advanced gyroscopes used in precision-guided vehicles, submarines, and air platforms are largely imported from Western suppliers, and a domestically engineered alternative would plug one of the quietest supply-chain gaps in India’s defence stack.
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The company also lists quantum technologies among its R&D interests, including quantum key distribution hardware for secure communications — early-stage work, but a sign of where the founders think precision navigation and secure comms converge.
Tested at Pokhran
The proof point came at the Indian Air Force’s Dronathon 2026, held at the Pokhran Field Firing Range in September 2026. PhoQtek flew a UAV in a GPS-denied environment and completed a short mission within the parameters the Air Force permitted. Nekkanti told The New Indian Express that PhoQtek was the only company to attempt a test in a GPS-denied environment across the three-day event — a striking data point given that the event’s own brief highlighted contested-spectrum operations as a core theme.
A founder story, and the secrecy question
PhoQtek Labs Private Limited was incorporated in January 2025, based in Secunderabad, Hyderabad, and is led by Gautham Nekkanti — who, by his own account, has no engineering degree and no conventional roadmap, and came to precision engineering through an obsession with learning and building. The company has said it wants to stay as secretive as possible about the details of its work — for its own protection and, in its words, for the country’s.
That posture is worth noting, because it limits what can be independently verified: most of the technical claims above come from the company itself. What is verifiable is that the navigation problem is real and urgent — the Air Force’s own Dronathon programme exists precisely to close it — and that PhoQtek put an aircraft in the sky at Pokhran under conditions designed to break GPS navigation. In the defence world, that is the audition that matters.
On its official channels this month, the company has been showing off more of the programme: a recent post claims the system has logged over 100 flight hours in GPS-denied environments, and another introduces GarudaNav ARGUS — presented as a ruggedised navigation module with multi-view hardware renders, suggesting the product line is moving from demonstrator toward a packaged avionics unit. Both claims come from the company itself; the flight-hour figure, in particular, is the kind of number a future customer or trial would independently want to see.
Why it matters
Every “first” in drone hardware gets the headlines; the navigation stack that makes those drones survivable rarely does. If GarudaNav works as the company describes — a retrofit module that gives already-procured military drones the ability to complete missions when jammers are active — it would upgrade an entire existing fleet without buying a single new airframe. That is an unusual and genuinely interesting way to attack one of the hardest problems in unmanned warfare.
