Asteria Aerospace’s revenue nearly doubled to ₹79 crore (about $8.2 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in the year to March 2025, according to its financial statements filed with the Registrar of Companies. Its net loss grew even faster, widening to ₹6.7 crore. That is the contradiction sitting at the centre of this company: a drone maker that Reliance Industries bought control of for barely ₹23 crore in 2019 is now selling hardware to India’s defence, energy and mining establishments at scale, and still cannot make each additional rupee of revenue pay for itself.
Asteria Aerospace Limited is a Bengaluru-based full-stack drone technology company — it designs and manufactures unmanned aircraft, builds the flight-control software that flies them, and runs a cloud platform called SkyDeck that turns the imagery they capture into maps, inspection reports and survey data. Reliance Strategic Business Ventures Limited (RSBVL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited, has held a majority stake since December 2019. It is one of only two Indian drone makers to hold Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) type certificates on two separate drone models, and it is also, as of April 2026, a company named in a Central Bureau of Investigation bribery probe. Both facts are documented below, with dates and sources.
Quick facts
| Company | Asteria Aerospace Limited |
| Founded | Incorporated 6 June 2011, Bengaluru (relocated from the US in late 2011) |
| Founder(s) | Neel Mehta and Nihar Vartak |
| Businesses | UAV/drone manufacturing, flight-control software, SkyDeck aerial-data platform, Drone-as-a-Service |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹79 crore (revenue from operations ₹78.7 crore), FY25 (year to 31 March 2025) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹6.7 crore, FY25 |
| Listed | Private — majority subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited |
| Market value / last valuation | No public valuation disclosed since 2019; the December 2019 deal (₹23.12 crore for 51.78%) implied a whole-company value of roughly ₹45 crore at the time |
| Key shareholders | Reliance Strategic Business Ventures Ltd (majority, since Dec 2019); co-founders Neel Mehta and Nihar Vartak (minority, retain board seats) |
What they do
Asteria Aerospace builds drones and the software around them, then sells both the hardware and the data pipeline to organisations that need to see terrain, assets or perimeters from the air without flying a helicopter or walking a survey team across it. Its customer base spans defence and homeland security agencies, oil and gas majors, mining and construction firms, telecom operators, and government land-records programmes, according to the company’s own site. Two drone families anchor the hardware line: the A200, a small quadcopter-class UAV, and the A200-XT, a longer-endurance model with a swappable day-camera and thermal-camera payload built for both daylight surveillance and night operations. Around these sits SkyDeck, a cloud platform for mission planning and turning raw aerial imagery into maps, inspection reports and analytics, and a Drone-as-a-Service offering that lets customers pay for a survey or inspection outcome rather than buy a fleet outright.
The origin
Neel Mehta and Nihar Vartak met studying aerospace engineering at Purdue University. Mehta went on to a master’s at Georgia Tech and a job at Rockwell Collins working on flight-control systems for Boeing and Airbus aircraft; Vartak worked as a design and systems engineer at Boeing before moving into supply-chain strategy at Accenture. Both were, in Mehta’s own words in an interview archived by FactorDaily, “fascinated about aerospace” and wanted to build something in India because they saw an emerging market in unmanned aircraft before most of the country’s regulators or investors did. They spent close to a year in the US validating the business case and prototyping a drone concept before relocating to Bengaluru in late 2011, incorporating the company on 6 June 2011. It was a bet on a market that, at the time, had almost no domestic drone-manufacturing base, no dedicated drone regulation, and no obvious first customer — which is exactly what the next few years would test.
The struggle years
The company’s early years were less about selling drones than about discovering how hard it was to build them in India at all. Mehta later summed up the core problem for FactorDaily: “We underestimated how hard it would be to develop hardware products without having an ecosystem in India.” There was no local supply chain for the sensors, motors and flight-control components a UAV needs, which meant sourcing internationally and iterating slowly. Two documented struggles stand out.
- 2012 — building from zero: Asteria’s first hire came from IIT Kanpur, brought in specifically to build the autopilot system, internally named Atom, because the founders had no off-the-shelf Indian alternative to buy or license.
- 2012–2015 — surviving on research contracts, not product sales: with no finished product to sell, the company took on research-and-development contracts with India’s National Aerospace Laboratories to fund the three years it took to get a real drone into the field, only launching its first integrated fixed-wing product, the Cygnus, around 2015, alongside a manufacturing approval from the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion.
That is close to four years between incorporation and a fieldable, sellable drone — a long, quiet stretch for a hardware startup with no revenue line to point to.
The turning point
The turning point had two edges, four years apart, and both are dated in the public record. In April 2016, the Border Security Force placed Asteria’s first commercial order — the company’s first paying customer after five years of prototypes and research contracts, and validation that a government security buyer would trust an Indian-made drone. Then, on 13 December 2019, Reliance Strategic Business Ventures Limited announced it had acquired a 51.78% stake in Asteria Aerospace for ₹23.12 crore, as reported by Business Standard, Trendlyne and YourStory. RSBVL also proposed a further investment of up to ₹125 crore, conditional on Asteria hitting agreed milestones by December 2021, which would have taken RSBVL’s holding to 87.3%. On one side of that December 2019 line: a nine-year-old hardware startup with a handful of government and enterprise contracts. On the other: majority ownership by one of India’s largest conglomerates, and a mandate to scale manufacturing fast enough to justify a nine-figure follow-on cheque.
The money behind it
Asteria’s funding history looks unusual for a hardware company of its age: it ran for the better part of a decade on grants, research contracts and a single disclosed institutional round before the Reliance deal replaced conventional venture funding altogether.
- Seed round, September 2018: Asteria raised $459,000 from Boundary Holding, its only disclosed equity round before the Reliance transaction (Tracxn, accessed September 2026).
- Non-equity support: the company is also listed as a participant in the Startup India CRPF Grand Challenge and the Adaptation SME Accelerator Project — government and multilateral programmes rather than equity investors (CB Insights, accessed September 2026).
- Controlling stake, 13 December 2019: Reliance Strategic Business Ventures Ltd acquired 51.78% of Asteria’s equity for ₹23.12 crore (Business Standard, Trendlyne, YourStory, December 2019).
- Conditional top-up, announced alongside the 2019 deal: RSBVL proposed to invest up to a further ₹125 crore if Asteria met agreed milestones by December 2021, which would have raised its stake to 87.3% (Business Standard, Trendlyne, December 2019).
- Where the stake actually stood: Reuters reported that, as of March 2024, Reliance’s holding in Asteria stood at 74% — short of the 87.3% the 2019 milestone structure pointed to, which suggests the full ₹125 crore was not drawn down on the original schedule, or that dilution offset it. Co-founders Neel Mehta and Nihar Vartak continue to hold shares and board seats, per MCA filings referenced by TheCompanyCheck (accessed September 2026).
No formal post-acquisition valuation for Asteria has been disclosed in the years since. The one hard data point remains the 2019 transaction itself: ₹23.12 crore for 51.78% implies a whole-company value of roughly ₹45 crore at the time — a modest sum next to the ₹79 crore of annual revenue the company now reports.
How it makes money
Asteria is, despite the “drone-as-a-service” branding, overwhelmingly a hardware seller today. Money comes in from manufacturing and selling physical drones and payload systems to government and enterprise buyers; a much smaller amount comes from service contracts — aerial mapping and agricultural-analytics engagements billed on a project basis. Costs are dominated by the cost of building the aircraft themselves.
- Revenue in, FY25: product sales of drones and hardware contributed ₹75.5 crore, or roughly 96% of revenue from operations; services (aerial mapping, agricultural analytics) contributed just ₹47 lakh (RoC filings via Startuppedia, September 2026).
- Costs out, FY25: cost of goods sold was ₹49.5 crore, more than double the ₹22 crore booked in FY24 — a direct read of how component and manufacturing costs scale with unit volumes (RoC filings via thekredible and Startuppedia).
- Where the margin sits: employee benefit expenses were ₹11 crore in FY25 against ₹8.8 crore in FY24; depreciation (largely on manufacturing and testing equipment) was ₹12.9 crore; finance costs were ₹4.5 crore — all rising in line with a company still investing in production capacity rather than harvesting margin from an established one.
- The part people get wrong: the “drone-as-a-service” and software-platform framing suggests a recurring, high-margin software business. The disclosed revenue split says otherwise — this is, for now, a capital- and component-intensive hardware manufacturer whose margins move with the cost of the parts that go into each aircraft, not a SaaS business with drones attached.
The numbers
Three years of filings show revenue accelerating sharply while losses widen rather than close, based on financial statements sourced from the Registrar of Companies.
| Fiscal year (₹ crore) | Revenue | Net loss |
|---|---|---|
| FY23 (year to Mar 2023) | 25.57 | >5.0 |
| FY24 (year to Mar 2024) | 41.6 | 2.0 |
| FY25 (year to Mar 2025) | 79.0 (78.7 from operations) | 6.7 |
- FY23: revenue of ₹25.57 crore with a net loss of more than ₹5 crore (RoC filings, via thekredible).
- FY24: revenue of ₹41.6 crore, up roughly 63% year on year, with the net loss narrowing sharply to ₹2 crore — the company’s best-run year on these metrics (thekredible; Startuppedia).
- FY25: revenue of ₹79 crore, up 90% year on year, but net loss widening more than threefold to ₹6.7 crore as cost of goods sold outpaced revenue growth (Startuppedia, RoC filings, September 2026).
- Total expenditure, FY25: ₹85.5 crore against revenue from operations of ₹78.7 crore — a cost-to-revenue ratio of about ₹1.09 spent for every ₹1 earned, versus ₹1.06 in FY24 (Startuppedia).
Where the money comes from
Asteria does not publish a formal geographic or customer-count breakdown, but its own disclosures and product mix point to a company concentrated in India, sold overwhelmingly through hardware, and serving a narrow band of institutional buyer types.
- By revenue line, FY25: products (drones, payloads, spares) — ₹75.5 crore; services (mapping, agri-analytics) — ₹0.47 crore. Hardware is not a segment alongside software here; it is nearly the entire business (Startuppedia, RoC filings).
- By customer type: defence and homeland security agencies, oil and gas, mining, construction, telecom, energy and government land-survey programmes are the industries the company names as its customer base (Asteria Aerospace corporate site, accessed September 2026).
- By deployment scale: the company states it has more than 400 drones deployed in the field, a figure corroborated by a Reuters factbox on the company published in April 2026.
- The surprise: for a company positioned around an AI software platform (SkyDeck) and an “as-a-service” pitch, almost none of FY25’s revenue actually came from services or recurring platform fees — the business is still, in practice, a drone factory with a software layer on top, not the other way round.
The risks
- An active bribery investigation involving its parent. In April 2026, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation arrested an aviation-regulator official and a Reliance executive over allegations that a $16,000 payment was arranged to clear three drone-import applications tied to Asteria (Reuters, via Yahoo News Singapore, April 2026). Reliance said it “did not authorise nor was aware of any such transactions.” The mechanism of the risk is direct: Asteria’s hardware business depends on importing components and finished systems that need regulatory clearance, and the case shows how much friction — and temptation to shortcut it — sits inside that approval pipeline.
- Losses that are widening, not narrowing, as revenue scales. Net loss fell to ₹2 crore in FY24 on ₹41.6 crore of revenue, then jumped to ₹6.7 crore in FY25 on ₹79 crore of revenue — cost of goods sold more than doubled (₹22 crore to ₹49.5 crore) while revenue only roughly doubled, meaning each extra rupee of sales is currently costing more, not less, to deliver (RoC filings via thekredible and Startuppedia). That is the opposite of the operating leverage a scaling hardware business needs to show.
- A capital-commitment structure that did not play out as announced. RSBVL’s 2019 agreement pointed to an 87.3% stake by December 2021 if Asteria hit its milestones; by March 2024, Reliance’s actual holding was reported at 74% (Reuters, April 2026). Whatever the reason — milestones not fully met, dilution, or a deliberate change of plan — a strategic investor’s follow-on capital in this structure is conditional, not guaranteed, and Asteria’s ability to fund manufacturing scale-up depends on continuing to earn it.
The takeaway
The lesson in Asteria’s numbers is not really about drones. It is about what a “platform” story can hide. A company can build a genuinely capable software layer — SkyDeck, mission planning, DGCA-certified aircraft two generations deep — and still run, underneath, as a low-margin manufacturer whose economics are set by the cost of motors, sensors and cameras rather than by code. Being bought by a conglomerate the size of Reliance does not switch off that arithmetic; it just changes who is paying to keep the lights on while the arithmetic gets fixed. The transferable point for any hardware-plus-software startup is to ask, honestly, which half of the pitch the revenue line actually agrees with — and to build the cost base for the business you are, not the one your investor deck describes.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns Asteria Aerospace now?
Reliance Strategic Business Ventures Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited, has held majority control since acquiring a 51.78% stake in December 2019 for ₹23.12 crore. Reuters reported Reliance’s holding at 74% as of March 2024. Co-founders Neel Mehta and Nihar Vartak retain minority shares and board seats.
Is Asteria Aerospace profitable?
No. The company reported a net loss of ₹6.7 crore in FY25 (year to March 2025) on revenue of ₹79 crore, according to financial statements filed with the Registrar of Companies — a wider loss than the ₹2 crore recorded in FY24, despite revenue growing 90% year on year.
What products does Asteria Aerospace make?
Its main hardware lines are the A200 and A200-XT drones, both holding DGCA type certificates, alongside the SkyDeck aerial-data software platform and a Drone-as-a-Service offering for customers who want survey or inspection outcomes rather than owned hardware.
When did Reliance acquire Asteria Aerospace?
Reliance Strategic Business Ventures Ltd announced the acquisition of a 51.78% stake for ₹23.12 crore on 13 December 2019, alongside a proposal to invest up to a further ₹125 crore conditional on Asteria meeting agreed milestones by December 2021.
What is the CBI investigation involving Asteria Aerospace about?
In April 2026, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation arrested a Reliance executive and an aviation-regulator official over allegations of a $16,000 payment to clear three drone-import applications connected to Asteria. Reliance has said it did not authorise or know of any such transactions, and the case was ongoing as of the report.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Business Standard, “RIL buys controlling stake in drone startup Asteria Aerospace,” December 2019
- Trendlyne, “RIL arm buys 51.78% stake in Asteria Aerospace,” December 2019
- YourStory, “RIL arm acquires 51.78 pc stake in Asteria Aerospace for Rs 23.12 Cr,” December 2019
- Startuppedia, “Founded by US-Trained Aerospace Engineers, Reliance-Acquired Drone Startup Asteria Aerospace Hits Rs 79 Crore Revenue in FY25,” September 2026
- Thekredible, “Asteria Aerospace reports 62% revenue surge in FY24, losses decline,” 2025
- Reuters, “Factbox — India’s Asteria, the Reliance unit at the centre of a bribery scandal,” via Yahoo News Singapore and TheSenTimes, April 2026
- FactorDaily (archived), “Asteria Aerospace: The Indian drone world’s best kept secret”
- Tofler, Asteria Aerospace Limited company filing summary (CIN U74999GJ2011PLC157849), accessed September 2026
- TheCompanyCheck, Asteria Aerospace Limited FY2026 profile (CIN U74999KA2011PTC110878), accessed September 2026
- Tracxn, Asteria Aerospace funding and investors profile, accessed September 2026
- CB Insights, Asteria Aerospace company profile, accessed September 2026
- TheePrint, “DGCA issues micro category drone certification to Asteria Aerospace,” October 2022
- LatestLY/PTI, “Asteria Aerospace Receives DGCA Type Certification for Its A200-XT Drone,” January 2023
- Asteria Aerospace corporate website (asteria.co.in), About Us and News pages, accessed September 2026
Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.