A forged certificate can open a door it should never open. A tampered purchase order can move money it should never move. And until now, India has had no common yardstick for judging whether the blockchain systems meant to stop all of that are actually secure. On 10 November 2026, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) handed that job to a startup from Mangaluru: Zupple Labs will build India’s first framework for security analysis and auditing of blockchain, under DRDO’s Technology Development Fund (TDF) programme.
The mandate is a first in more than one sense. Fewer than 90 projects have made it through the TDF programme in its ten-year history, and this is the first in the blockchain domain. The project, titled ‘Security Analysis and Auditing of Blockchain’, will be run with DRDO’s Scientific Analysis Group as the nodal laboratory, and the framework it produces is meant to become the standard against which every blockchain application built for defence is measured.
What DRDO has asked Zupple to build
Over the next 30 months, Zupple Labs will develop a platform that DRDO will use to standardise security audits of upcoming blockchain applications across the defence sector. As defence agencies explore distributed ledgers for records, logistics and authentication, a common auditing standard gives every new application the same security bar before deployment — and keeps that capability built and owned in India.
There is currently no recognised framework for evaluating blockchain applications being developed or deployed for military purposes, and that is exactly the gap Zupple has been asked to close. The company says the defence sector could start adopting blockchain for various applications in the next few years, and when it does, the rulebook will already be Indian.
The company behind it
Zupple Labs is a Mangaluru-based startup specialising in digital credentials and enterprise-grade blockchain solutions, led by CEO and co-founder Neil Kevin Martis with co-founder and CTO Shesha Vishnu Prasad. Its flagship platform, LegitDoc, is a one-stop platform for issuing, managing and verifying digital credentials secured by blockchain — built on Ethereum, Polygon and Avalanche, and designed so a document issued anywhere can be verified from anywhere in the world in about ten seconds.
The DRDO mandate builds on a public-sector track record that already spans four countries. The company says its software has been adopted by 10 Indian public sector customers and that it has managed more than 300 million credentials. In Maharashtra, LegitDoc has powered the issue of over a million verifiable diploma certificates for the State Board of Skill, Vocational Education and Training, alongside 65,000 tribal caste certificates in Gadchiroli and more than 100,000 degree certificates. In Chhattisgarh, the district administration of Dantewada migrated 750,000 land records to the Avalanche blockchain through LegitDoc, with verification kiosks across its tehsils. And at Hindustan Petroleum, LegitDoc secures tamper-proof digital purchase orders — more than 3,000 issued — verifiable on both the public NEAR blockchain and a private Hyperledger Fabric network.
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The same technology has travelled well beyond India: Zupple has delivered solutions for the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the United Nations Population Fund, the Governments of Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra, the Government of Kenya, and the Australian and New Zealand student immigration ecosystems. The startup was a winner of the Karnataka government’s Elevate programme in 2019 and is part of this year’s Bolpu accelerator cohort for Mangaluru startups.
Why it matters
Trust is infrastructure. A land record a farmer can prove, a diploma an employer can verify in seconds, a purchase order no one can forge — each one is a small piece of a country that runs on records it can believe. Zupple Labs has spent years building that trust layer for governments and institutions, one credential at a time, from a tier-2 city on Karnataka’s coast. Now the same team is writing the standard that will decide which blockchain systems are fit for India’s defence. It is deep-tech work of national significance, built in Mangaluru, for the whole country — and it is exactly the kind of Indian engineering the world should be watching.
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