In a paddy field in Bihar, a blue hexacopter rises over the crop, its nozzles misting the plants below in one even pass. Seven minutes later it has covered an acre — work that takes a farm worker most of a day with a knapsack sprayer, breathing in chemicals all the while. The drone is the Kisan Drone V10, built in Patna by Vaimanika Aerospace, a startup turning Bihar into an unlikely hub of India’s farm-drone economy.
Vaimanika Aerospace’s Kisan Drone V10. (Official photo: Vaimanika Aerospace)
The drone that sprays an acre in seven minutes
The Kisan Drone V10 is a hexacopter built around a 10-litre spray tank, designed for the realities of Indian farmland: small plots, uneven ground and long, hot working days. The company says it covers an acre in under seven minutes, uses 90% less water than manual spraying, and keeps the farmer out of the chemical drift entirely. Its Drone-as-a-Service network charges farmers around ₹450 an acre, so a smallholder never has to buy the machine to use it.
The drone earned its Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) type certificate in February 2025, and the company says it was the first startup in eastern India to receive one. The certificate means the V10 can be sold and flown commercially anywhere in the country, and it puts a Patna-built machine on the same regulatory footing as drones from India’s biggest manufacturers. For farmers, the V10 is also available to buy outright, priced between ₹4 lakh and ₹7.5 lakh, with training and support from the company.
A startup built in Patna, flying in ten states
Vaimanika Aerospace was founded in Patna in July 2022 by Manish Dixit, a robotics and UAV expert with more than a decade in the field, together with co-founder Anamika Anand. The company is incubated at IIT Patna and supported by the Bihar government, with advisors including IIT Patna professor Dr Jawar Singh. From that base it has built a network of around 210 drones flying spraying missions across ten states, coordinated through a mobile app that connects more than a thousand pilots and drone owners.
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The model is deliberately built to spread income as well as technology. Through Vaimanika’s franchise network, rural youth can earn ₹1,000 for every qualified demo they run in their own district, plus sales commission and service income from maintenance and spares — turning a drone demonstration into a livelihood in villages where such work barely existed a few years ago.
The numbers behind the network
The growth has been fast and, unusually for a hardware startup, profitable from early on. The company posted ₹8.5 crore in revenue in FY24 and ₹24.5 crore in FY25, with profits of ₹1.1 crore and ₹5 crore respectively, according to YourStory. A report by Inc42 in October 2026 put its spraying revenue at nearly ₹35 crore across its roughly 210-drone network.
The order book tells the same story. Vaimanika holds a ₹32-crore contract from UPL and a memorandum of understanding with IFFCO covering 15 lakh acres, alongside tie-ups with QTrino Labs and Aries Ltd for a 1,000-drone deployment and a partnership with MITHRON India Smart Services to set up 100 drone centres across South India. In 2024 it was named Best Startup of the Year at the Bihar Startup Awards.
And the company’s ambitions reach beyond the farm. It has built a delivery drone that the company says can carry 1.5 kg up to 80 km, and it has tested a 100-kg heavy-lift drone, with a 200-kg rescue version next — machines aimed at disaster relief, emergency logistics and remote-area supply. The same Patna workshop that taught a drone to spray a paddy field in seven minutes is now teaching it to carry medicine to places no road reaches.
Keep reading: The Robot That Weeds, Seeds and Sprays on Its Own: Inside Pragyanik AI, the Indore Startup Building Farm Robots for India’s Small Farms · A Greenhouse in a Box: Inside Kheyti, the Hyderabad Startup Helping Small Farmers Beat the Heat · More Food Processing & Agri-Tech stories
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