India builds its own aircraft and drones, but the engines that power them almost always arrive from abroad. Gas turbines sit at the very top of the hardest-machines-to-build list: they run hot, spin at tens of thousands of revolutions per minute, and must hold their tolerances for thousands of hours without a single failure. The global supplier list is short, and that dependency has quietly shaped what Indian aerospace can and cannot attempt on its own. Bengaluru-based Nabhdrishti Aerospace was founded to change that — starting not with a giant turbofan, but with the micro gas turbines that are about to become the beating heart of India’s drones, light aircraft and distributed power systems.
The company was founded in 2023 by three propulsion engineers — CEO Rohit Chouhan, Arjun Srivatsa and Antanu Sadhu — whose careers run through General Electric, Rolls-Royce and the DRDO’s Gas Turbine Research Establishment, the very laboratory India built to master jet engines. Operating out of the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, the trio is channelling decades of combined big-engine expertise into a single micro gas turbine core that can do two jobs: propulsion and power generation.
That one-core philosophy is the heart of the engineering. Instead of developing separate engines for each market, Nabhdrishti designed a single core architecture and is deriving a family of products from it. The ND350 is a fuel-flexible micro gas turbine configured either as a 275 kW turbogenerator or as a 350 SHP turboprop, aimed at light aviation and distributed power. The ND400 is a 400 Newton-class turbojet for unmanned aerial vehicles and small aircraft — the company publishes its own specifications: a maximum thrust of 400 Newtons, a top speed of 95,000 revolutions per minute, an engine weight of just 3.95 kg, and an operating envelope reaching Mach 0.85 and altitudes of 10,000 metres. The ND2000 scales the same core up to two megawatts for industrial and defence users. Sharing the core across all three spreads the enormous cost of turbine development across a far wider market — and gives the company a revenue path on the industrial side while the aviation programme is still in testing.
The other design decision is fuel flexibility. Nabhdrishti’s engines are built to run on more than one fuel — the company says conventional fuels, biofuels and even green hydrogen — because the combustor, where different fuels burn at different speeds and temperatures, was the first thing the team built and tested. The earliest work funded by the company’s pre-seed round went into a fuel-flexible combustor prototype and fuel-injector testing. The company’s design also features an innovative recuperator, which it says pushes efficiency above 15% compared with existing turbines in its class while keeping costs below half of the competition.
The programme moved at a remarkable pace. In January 2026, Nabhdrishti ran its ND400 for the first time — and the company described the campaign as taking the engine from a clean-sheet design to a successful first run in nine months, publishing video of the test from its own facilities. For context, a conventional jet-engine programme of any size typically measures development in years, not months; the team’s advanced simulation tools, additive manufacturing and modular test rigs are how they compressed the timeline. Accel, which led the company’s Rs 25.64 crore seed round in March 2025 (on top of a Rs 3 crore pre-seed round led by IIMA Ventures in April 2024), has pointed to propulsion as one of the hardest bottlenecks in aerospace for emerging markets — and to Nabhdrishti’s dual-market approach as the way to pair near-term commercial use with long-term ambition.
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The ND400 engine’s journey from clean-sheet design to first run, filmed by Nabhdrishti’s own team.
Nabhdrishti says it aims to become India’s leading propulsion provider by 2032. If it gets there, the quiet dependency that has defined Indian aerospace for decades — the imported engine at the centre of every ambitious machine — starts to look like a problem India solved for itself, one micro turbine at a time.
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