In February 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off 100 Kisan drones flying simultaneously across 100 Indian villages, and set the company behind them a target: one lakh Made-in-India drones in two years. The company was Garuda Aerospace, a Chennai startup founded in 2015, and four years on it has become the biggest drone maker India has ever produced. The company says it has built more than 5,000 drones, flown over a million hours, and now holds around 30% of India’s agricultural drone market. Its revenue, the company says, reached ₹206 crore in FY26, with a net profit of ₹25.9 crore — and a ₹1,000 crore stock-market listing is now in sight.
The machine at the heart of it is the Kisan drone, built for Indian fields.
The DGCA type-certified sprayer comes in 8, 10 and 16-litre variants, with 15–20 micron nozzles that mist a crop in a fine, even coat, a 20-megapixel camera watching crop health from above, and a spraying rate the company puts at 1,500–2,500 square metres a minute — about 30 acres in a day. At ₹4.5 lakh, the company says it is India’s most affordable advanced agri drone with DGCA type certification, and buyers can access ₹10 lakh unsecured loans from the Agri Infrastructure Fund at 5% interest with 50–100% subsidy. Garuda was the first Indian drone startup to hold both DGCA type certification for its aircraft and a Remote Pilot Training Organisation licence, and the company says it now holds six DGCA certifications. Its Kisan drones also fly in the government’s Namo Drone Didi programme, which is putting 15,000 drones in the hands of women self-help groups across the country.
What makes Garuda unusual is that flying drones for other people is now a bigger business than selling them. In FY26, the company says services brought in ₹106.5 crore against ₹99.4 crore from drone and parts sales, as its Drone-as-a-Service teams inspect plants for NTPC and Indian Oil, map land for the Survey of India, survey highways for NHAI, and spray fields under contract — including 500 Kisan drone orders from ten fertiliser companies. The same fleet works in defence and conservation: Garuda unveiled eight new drones at Aero India 2025, including rocket-launcher drones, and in March 2026 the Vice President of India unveiled its elephant-darting drone, the latest version of a system first built for the Tamil Nadu Forest Department a decade ago. In March 2026 the company also signed with Airbus Helicopters to acquire up to 18 Flexrotor uncrewed systems — 25-kg aircraft that stay airborne for 12–14 hours — to offer long-endurance services worldwide, and in June it partnered with France’s Extensee SAS to take its drone services global.
The numbers tell the story of a company that has learned to make money while it scales. From about ₹47 crore of revenue in FY23, Garuda grew to ₹123.5 crore in FY25 and ₹206 crore in FY26, the company says, with profit rising 41% to ₹25.9 crore. In April 2026 it confidentially filed draft IPO papers with SEBI for an issue of around ₹1,000 crore — ₹750 crore of fresh shares and a ₹250 crore offer for sale — received the regulator’s observations in August, and is targeting a listing in the first quarter of 2027. A pre-IPO round of about $10 million at a $320 million valuation followed in October, led by the Motherson family office and Dubai’s Aditum Investment Group. Cricket legend M.S. Dhoni is an investor in the company and its brand ambassador.
It all started in Chennai in October 2015, when founder Agnishwar Jayaprakash and co-founder Rithika Mohan set out to build drones for Indian conditions. Today the company says it operates in 84 Indian cities, runs drone operations in Sri Lanka, and holds export approvals for the United States, Australia and key Middle Eastern markets, with more than 30 drone types and 50 services spanning agriculture, defence, infrastructure, mining and disaster response. In June 2024 it opened India’s first exclusive drone showroom in Chennai. From a sprayer over a paddy field to a Flexrotor watching a pipeline from 12 hours aloft, Garuda’s fleet is now part of how India farms, builds, watches and protects itself — and the company that started with a single Kisan drone is aiming, quite literally, at the stock exchange next.
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