Startup Deep Dive : Marut Drones — the dengue drone that became a farm business

Marut Drones tripled its revenue to ₹24.3 crore in FY24, then watched it slide 15 per cent the very next year, even as India’s push for farm drones was supposedly just getting started. The company that began by killing mosquito larvae over a Hyderabad lake now builds machines that spray pesticide, sow rice seed by air and once flew a temperature-controlled vaccine box 41 kilometres across rural Telangana in 32 minutes.

That contradiction — a hot growth story that cooled off within a year of raising its first big institutional cheque — is the real story of Marut Drones. This is a company built on a public-health accident, saved by a government pilot project, certified into a real product only in December 2022, and still working out whether Indian agriculture is ready to pay for what it sells.

Quick facts

What they do

Marut Drones designs, builds and services multi-utility drones for Indian farms, sold either as hardware or as a pay-per-use service. Its flagship AG365 line sprays pesticide and fertiliser, its Seedcopter direct-sows crops such as rice from the air, and a family of monitoring drones scouts fields for pest and disease stress. Around that core sit adjacent lines built on the same airframes: surveillance and mapping drones for industrial clients such as state-owned miner NMDC, water-management drones that clear lake weed, and disaster-response and medical-delivery drones that trace back to the company’s original public-health mission. Customers span individual and cooperative farmers (often reached through drone-as-a-service hubs and self-help groups rather than direct sales), state governments running subsidised drone programmes, agri-input companies such as IFFCO, and industrial buyers who need aerial data or spraying at scale.

The origin

Marut Drones did not start as an agriculture company. Prem Kumar Vislawath, an IIT Guwahati engineering graduate, built the company’s first drone to solve a problem in his own parents’ neighbourhood in Hyderabad. During the city’s severe dengue outbreak of 2016–17, when more than 20,000 cases were reported, local health authorities told Vislawath that their usual method of spraying larvicide over stagnant water and lakes was slow, imprecise and dangerous for workers wading into infested ponds. He adapted a drone to spray larvicide over the water bodies instead. Within a year, dengue cases in the areas the drone covered had dropped from that 20,000-plus citywide count to under 1,500, according to the company’s own account of the pilot. That result was the founding insight: a drone that could apply a liquid precisely over water or crops from the air was worth far more than a novelty toy, and Vislawath formally incorporated Marut Dronetech in 2019 with co-founders Suraj Peddi, an IIT Guwahati-trained electronics engineer who became CTO, and Sai Kumar Chinthala, an entrepreneur and filmmaker who had earlier co-founded production ventures Raasta Studios and Raasta Films.

The struggle years

A working mosquito-control drone did not automatically make a company. Public-health spraying contracts came from cash-strapped municipal and state health departments, paid slowly and did not scale the way a venture-backed hardware business needed to. The founders went looking for a bigger, paying problem the same aircraft could solve, and found it, by their own account, in a grim piece of Indian rural folklore: the so-called “cancer train” that runs daily between Punjab and Rajasthan carrying patients for treatment, roughly nine in ten of them farmers whose illness is linked to years of exposure to chemical pesticides sprayed by hand or backpack pump. If a drone could keep a human being’s skin and lungs away from that spray, the founders reasoned, farmers themselves — not just governments — might eventually pay for it. That pivot from disease control to agriculture reset the company’s whole product roadmap in its early years. It also ran head-on into a harder, less romantic problem: sourcing. Critical components — motors, flight controllers, batteries, precision sensors — remained heavily import-dependent even as Marut assembled and tested its airframes in India, and the company was still publicly flagging this as an active constraint, and searching for domestic component partners, as late as February 2023.

The turning point

The moment that took Marut Drones from a promising prototype-maker to a certified manufacturer came in two connected steps. First, in September 2021, the company’s long-range Hepicopter drone was chosen to fly India’s “Medicine from the Sky” trial in Telangana’s Vikarabad district — a government-sanctioned beyond-visual-line-of-sight flight that carried a five-kilogram, temperature-controlled payload of vaccines and medicines 41 kilometres from a hospital in Vikarabad town to a primary health centre in Bomraspet, in about 32 minutes, with Apollo Hospitals staff verifying the payload’s temperature integrity on arrival. The flight, backed by Telangana’s IT and civil aviation ministries, gave Marut a rare, government-verified proof point at a time when most Indian drone rules still treated any serious commercial flight as an exception to be negotiated case by case. Second, and more consequentially for the balance sheet, the company’s AG-365S became the first small-category agricultural drone in India to win a full DGCA type certificate, announced in December 2022, after testing across more than 1.5 lakh acres. That certificate is what let Marut sell the AG365 as a compliant, subsidy-eligible commercial product rather than a demonstration unit. The numbers on either side of that certification make the case for how large a hinge point it was: in FY23, the year the certificate landed, revenue was still a modest ₹5.4 crore; by FY24, the first full year of selling a type-certified drone, revenue had jumped to ₹24.3 crore — growth of 346.5 per cent over FY23.

The money behind it

• Seed stage (from 2019): early capital and grants came from impact-focused backers rather than mainstream venture funds — including incubator/accelerator support and, per company and database records, early-stage investment from Villgro, the SBI Revolving Fund for Social Enterprises and the Facebook India Innovation Hub, alongside agri-focused institutional angels a-IDEA NAARM, AgHub and WRI India. Amounts for this stage are undisclosed.
• Series A — $6.2 million, announced 5–6 November 2024: led by Lok Capital, an impact investor, with participation from existing backers. Lok Capital director Hari Krishnan framed the thesis around agri-drones’ ability to protect crop health while saving water and preserving soil.
• Use of the round: company statements earmarked the money for expanding manufacturing, developing new agricultural applications, building out channel partners and service centres in tier-2 and tier-3 towns, launching 17 new drone training academies, and setting up drone-as-a-service hubs.
• Stated ambition: CEO Prem Kumar Vislawath told press the company was targeting manufacturing capacity of 3,000 drones a year and revenue of ₹1,000 crore (~$104 million at ₹96 to the dollar) within five years of the round — a company-stated target, not an audited forecast.
• Latest valuation: not disclosed. Company-tracking databases including PitchBook, Tracxn and CB Insights each list the post-money figure from the November 2024 round as redacted or unavailable, so no reported number can responsibly be printed here.

How it makes money

• Drone sales: the AG365 family is sold outright to entrepreneurs, farmer-producer organisations and self-help groups, at a retail price reported in the ₹10–12 lakh range per unit.
• Drone-as-a-service (DaaS): for farmers who cannot buy a drone outright, Marut and its trained operator network offer per-acre spraying and seeding, priced at roughly ₹500 an acre according to the company; this is the model behind its partnership with fertiliser cooperative IFFCO to offer DaaS coverage across a reported 5 lakh acres.
• Pilot training and academies: Marut runs DGCA-recognised Remote Pilot Training Organisation (RPTO) academies, monetising certification fees; more than 1,000 people were trained in a recent six-month stretch, and the company said in November 2024 it would open 17 more academies.
• Operator economics as a selling point: the company markets entrepreneur earnings of roughly ₹40,000–90,000 from running a certified AG365, and says women drone operators trained under its self-help-group programme — it has placed around 150 AG365 units with women’s SHGs — can earn up to ₹80,000 a month, a figure aimed at driving adoption rather than an audited payout.
• Industrial and institutional contracts: custom surveillance and mapping drones for industrial clients such as NMDC sit alongside the farm business, though the company does not publish a revenue split between these lines.
• Where the margin sits: hardware manufacturing at scale is the capital-intensive, thinner-margin part of the model (hence the push toward 3,000 units a year to get unit economics working); training and DaaS are the smaller but stickier, more service-like layers on top. Neither a published take rate nor a gross margin figure is available, so none is asserted here.
• The part people get wrong: Marut is often described purely as a drone manufacturer, but a large share of its stated growth plan — academies, service hubs, SHG placements — is really a rural distribution and training network built to get an expensive machine into the hands of people who cannot easily finance or operate one alone.

The numbers

• FY24 revenue growth of 346.5 per cent came in the first full year after the AG-365S’s December 2022 DGCA type certificate.
• FY25 revenue fell back roughly 15 per cent even as the company had just closed its Series A, a reminder that a funding headline and an operating year do not always move in the same direction.
• FY25’s net loss of ₹11.5 crore is corroborated directionally by RoC-filing trackers showing a sharp year-on-year deterioration in both net profit and EBITDA for the same year.

Where the money comes from

• Agriculture (the core): the AG365 spraying/seeding family and Seedcopter are the primary revenue line, sold to individual entrepreneurs, FPOs and SHGs, and increasingly booked as DaaS acreage rather than one-off hardware sales.
• Service and training network: as of November 2024 the company said it had a fleet of roughly 750 drones and more than 1,000 trained pilots operating across 14 states — the distribution backbone for both DaaS and academy revenue.
• Institutional partnerships: the IFFCO tie-up for DaaS coverage over a reported 5 lakh acres is the clearest large-scale channel deal disclosed to date.
• Industrial and custom drones: contracts such as work for miner NMDC sit outside agriculture altogether, though the company has not broken out what share of revenue this contributes.
• The surprise: despite being pitched almost entirely as an agri-tech company today, Marut still carries its original public-health and disaster DNA — its Hepicopter medical-delivery drone and water-hyacinth-clearing Aquacopter both trace directly back to the pre-2019 mosquito-control work, even though neither is a large disclosed revenue line on its own.

The risks

• Subsidy dependency: at a reported ₹10–12 lakh per unit, an AG365 costs far more than most Indian farmers can pay outright — government data cited by the company’s own reporting notes the vast majority of Indian farmers hold small plots — so volume sales lean heavily on state and central drone subsidy schemes; any tightening or delay in that subsidy pipeline would directly slow hardware sales, which is plausibly part of what happened in FY25.
• Import dependence on core components: motors, batteries, flight controllers and sensors remain substantially import-sourced even for an Indian-assembled drone, a constraint the company itself has publicly acknowledged while seeking domestic manufacturing partners; currency swings or supply shocks on these inputs flow straight into unit cost.
• Crowded, subsidy-chasing competitive field: Marut competes with a growing list of DGCA-certified Indian agri-drone makers for the same government tenders and subsidy-linked farmer sales, a dynamic that pressures pricing and makes revenue lumpy around tender and subsidy cycles rather than smoothly recurring.

The takeaway

Marut Drones’ most useful lesson is not about drones at all. A technology built to solve one narrow, mission-driven problem — spraying larvicide over a few lakes to fight dengue — only became a real company once its founders found a second, much larger customer willing to actually pay for the same core capability: farmers exposed to the same kind of chemical spray, at a scale a health department never could fund. The near-350 per cent revenue jump that followed its DGCA certification shows how much value a credible, government-backed compliance stamp can unlock for a hardware company selling into a regulated, safety-sensitive category. But the sharp pullback the very next year is just as instructive: certification and funding headlines open a door, they do not by themselves guarantee that enough customers walk through it every single year.

Frequently asked questions

What does Marut Drones make?

Marut Drones makes multi-utility drones, chiefly its AG365 family for agricultural spraying, fertiliser and seed broadcasting, and direct seeding, alongside crop-monitoring, industrial surveillance and disaster-response drones built on similar airframes.

Who founded Marut Drones and when?

It was founded in 2019 in Hyderabad by Prem Kumar Vislawath (CEO), Suraj Peddi (CTO) and Sai Kumar Chinthala, growing out of an earlier drone Vislawath had built to spray larvicide during Hyderabad’s 2016–17 dengue outbreak.

How much funding has Marut Drones raised?

Its disclosed institutional raise is a $6.2 million Series A led by impact investor Lok Capital, announced in November 2024, on top of undisclosed earlier seed-stage support from backers including Villgro, the SBI Revolving Fund for Social Enterprises and agri-focused angel investors. Its latest valuation has not been publicly disclosed.

Is Marut Drones profitable?

No. The company posted a net loss of ₹11.5 crore in FY25, a year in which revenue also fell around 15 per cent from FY24’s ₹24.3 crore to roughly ₹20.5–20.65 crore.

What is Marut Drones’ business model?

It earns through outright drone sales (reportedly ₹10–12 lakh per AG365 unit), a per-acre drone-as-a-service offering (around ₹500 an acre) for farmers who cannot buy a drone outright, DGCA-recognised pilot training academy fees, and industrial or institutional drone contracts, though it has not disclosed a revenue split across these lines.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• The Machine Maker, “Marut Drones Secures $6.2 Million in Series A Funding to Enhance Product Development and Manufacturing,” November 2024
• DroneLife, “Marut Drones Secures $6.2 Million in Series A Funding Amid India’s Push for Domestic Drone Manufacturing,” November 2024
• Commercial UAV News, “Dronetech firm Marut Drones bags $6.2M in Series A funding from Lok Capital,” November 2024
• Telangana Today, “Hyderabad-based Marut Drones get DGCA certification for its AG 365 drone,” December 2022
• Telangana Today / Fortune, reporting on the Telangana “Medicine from the Sky” BVLOS drone-delivery trial in Vikarabad district, September 2021
• Indian Startup Times, “Flying Beyond Limits: Prem Kumar Vislawath’s Mission to Revolutionize India with Marut Drones,” June 2025
• APAC Media (apacnewsnetwork.com), interview feature on Marut Drones co-founder Prem Kumar Vislawath, February 2023
• Inc42 company financials database, Marut Drones profile, accessed September 2026
• Tofler company filings summary, Marut Dronetech Private Limited, accessed September 2026
• CB Insights company profile and funding timeline, Marut Drones, accessed September 2026
• Marut Drones company website (About Us and AG 365 product pages), accessed September 2026

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