Startup Deep Dive : Botlab Dynamics — the drone company behind Republic Day’s sky show earns almost nothing from defence

Botlab Dynamics turned the night sky over Rashtrapati Bhavan into a national talking point on 29 January 2022, flying 1,000 drones in formation for the Beating Retreat ceremony while the President and Prime Minister watched. Three years later, the company that the government trusts to choreograph the sky over Republic Day posted just ₹48.5 crore (~$5.05 million) in revenue for the year ended March 2025 — and by its own co-founder’s account, almost none of that money comes from defence.

That gap between spectacle and scale is the real story. Botlab was built by three IIT Delhi graduates on savings and side gigs, nearly derailed by a failed demonstration in front of the Army chief, and rebuilt around one unglamorous decision: making its own flight controllers and GPS units because nobody in India would sell them one that worked. The gamble paid for itself in a $55.96 million valuation by April 2025 — but the company still earns its keep largely from weddings, cricket finals and brand launches, not the battlefield.

Quick facts

What they do

Botlab Dynamics designs, builds and flies choreographed drone swarms, and increasingly, indigenous drone hardware for India’s defence establishment. Its core product is the drone light show: fleets of small quadcopters carrying LEDs, flown by proprietary swarm-control software, forming animated patterns and words in the night sky. It has staged these for the Indian Air Force’s Beating Retreat, IPL finals, weddings, brand launches and government ceremonies, for clients ranging from the Ministry of Defence to Reliance, Tata and Godrej. Under co-founder Dr Sarita Ahlawat’s own account, close to 99% of revenue still comes from these shows as a service, not from selling drones outright.

• Drone light shows and swarm events — company-stated ~99% of revenue, FY25 (Electronics For You interview)
• Vayudh — indigenous surveillance and defence drones, developed under the government’s iDEX innovation programme
• BotLab Store — flight controllers, ESCs, GPS modules and firmware sold to other manufacturers, researchers and hobbyists, launched July 2025 (company blog)

The origin

Tanmay Bunkar and Anuj Kumar Barnwal were batchmates in IIT Delhi’s 2014 engineering physics cohort. Bunkar had already built his first UAV before the company existed and led a 2014 contract to deliver eight drones to the Delhi Police. The two laid the groundwork for a company through 2015, and formally incorporated Botlab Dynamics Private Limited on 18 July 2016 inside IIT Delhi’s Technology Business Incubator. Dr Sarita Ahlawat, who holds a PhD in bioinformatics from the University of Illinois and had previously worked as a research affiliate with the New York State Department of Health, joined roughly six months later, drawn less by drones themselves than by the open hardware problem underneath them.

The founding insight was narrow but stubborn: India’s drone systems, whether for agriculture, defence demonstrations or entertainment, all leaned on imported flight controllers and GPS modules, and nobody local had built a dependable substitute. The founders’ first paid work reflected that gap directly — heavy-lift drone systems delivered to the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in 2016 — before the team arrived at the idea that would eventually define the company: the real asset was not any single drone, but the swarm algorithm that let dozens, then thousands, fly the same formation together.

The struggle years

The first two years ran on founders’ personal savings and family contributions. To keep the company alive through 2016 and 2017, the team took on side projects and consulting work between drone contracts, supplementing a small ₹50 lakh grant from the Department of Science and Technology under the NIDHI programme in 2017. It was survival funding, not growth capital.

The lowest point came in 2019, when the Army Design Bureau invited the team to demonstrate a heavy-payload drone in front of the late Army chief General Bipin Rawat at Pokhran. The drone failed. Its components were hobby-grade, sourced off the shelf rather than engineered for the job, and the failure forced a hard pivot: build the flight controller, GPS module and motor controller in-house rather than trust imported parts again. It took roughly 15 iterations over 18 months to get a reliable flight controller, and a custom GPS unit the team built for about ₹8,000, against roughly ₹40,000 for an equivalent import. In parallel, an attempted business in heavy-payload cargo drones for defence stalled entirely — India had no standardised testing infrastructure for the category, and the market was thin. Dr Ahlawat’s alternative proposal, choreographed drone light shows, was first tested at Dussehra 2019 with just ten drones carrying LEDs, no music, no choreography. By the time COVID-19 reached India, the team had only managed to fly 50 drones together indigenously — a fraction of what a real public show would need.

The turning point

What changed the company’s trajectory was not a pitch deck but a video. Footage of the team’s early swarm tests, shared on social media during the pandemic, reached the Ministry of Defence and drew an invitation to attempt something at Republic Day. The problem was scale: when the ministry asked, Botlab could reliably fly only around 100 drones together, and it had roughly six months to reach 1,000. The team leaned on unlikely manufacturing help — fruit-basket vendors from Seelampur and small plastic-moulding units in Manesar and Faridabad were brought in to mass-produce drone bodies cheaply — and grew its event team from a dozen people to about 40. On 29 January 2022, Botlab flew 1,000 drones over Rashtrapati Bhavan for the Beating Retreat ceremony, forming the number 75 to mark 75 years of independence, the Make in India lion, a rotating globe and the Tricolour, with the President and Prime Minister in attendance. It made India only the fourth country in the world to have staged a drone show at that scale. What had been a hardware-constrained hobbyist project became, almost overnight, a company the state was willing to showcase — and, soon after, one that global brands and Guinness World Records would come calling for.

The money behind it

Botlab’s funding has moved in step with its credibility, starting as grants and ending as venture capital once the Republic Day show gave it a public track record.

• 2017: ₹50 lakh grant from the Department of Science and Technology under the NIDHI programme — early survival capital, no equity (Better India; company blog)
• 2019: iDEX grant plus a Prime Minister’s Award worth ₹1.5 crore for defence-tech R&D, from the Ministry of Defence’s innovation arm (Better India)
• 2022: Seed funding round involving the Department of Science and Technology, around the time of the Beating Retreat show (Tracxn)
• July 2023: Seed round with participation from LetsVenture’s angel syndicate (Tracxn; CB Insights)
• August 2023: ₹20 crore (~$2.4 million) from Florintree Advisors — the first major institutional growth cheque, which funded the shift from dozens to thousands of drones (Tracxn)
• April 2025: $10 million raised by Vayudh, Botlab’s defence arm, led by Dharana Capital, with participation from Zomato/Eternal founder Deepinder Goyal, Ajay Aggarwal, Sumit Jalan, LetsVenture and Navam Capital — the first capital earmarked specifically for defence-grade hardware and government deployment (Business Standard; Bar and Bench)

Total disclosed funding stands at $14.3 million across seven rounds, valuing the company at $55.96 million (~₹537 crore, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) as of April 2025, according to Tracxn and TheCompanyCheck.

How it makes money

The business is closer to an events company than a drone manufacturer, at least so far. Clients pay per show; Botlab supplies the drone fleet, choreography, ground crew and airspace coordination, then takes the hardware home afterwards to redeploy at the next event.

• Revenue: event-based service fees for drone light shows — over 700 shows staged to date, according to the company, for clients including Tata’s IPL, the Northeast Olympic Games, Pokémon, Mercedes, Amul, Paytm, Zomato, Godrej Properties, Amazon and Mahindra
• Cost structure: motors, propellers and batteries are still imported; flight controllers, RTK GPS modules, ELRS receivers and RF electronics are built in-house, cutting the single biggest historical cost — a custom GPS module costs Botlab about ₹8,000 versus roughly ₹40,000 for an imported equivalent (Better India)
• Margin driver: because Botlab owns both the hardware and the swarm software, the same physical fleet is reused across hundreds of shows rather than sold once, amortising each drone’s cost over many events rather than a single sale
• What people get wrong: the company looks like a drone manufacturer because of its Republic Day and defence coverage, but its own leadership says roughly 99% of FY25 revenue is services income from shows; hardware sales and defence contracts are still small, newer lines (Electronics For You interview)
• Emerging lines: BotLab Store, launched July 2025, sells flight controllers, ESCs, GPS modules and firmware to other drone-makers and hobbyists; Vayudh sells and demonstrates defence-grade hardware — including the nano surveillance drone Atri and the Vayusim training simulator — to Indian defence buyers through the government’s iDEX programme

The numbers

Public financial detail is limited for a private company, and figures below are compiled from company disclosures and MCA-filing aggregators; where a figure is estimated rather than directly disclosed, it is marked so.

Where the money comes from

• By revenue line (FY25, company-stated): approximately 99% from drone light shows and events; the remainder from early hardware sales and defence work (Electronics For You interview)
• By client type: private and commercial bookings dominate — weddings (12 or more staged in 2024 alone, including the widely reported Ambani pre-wedding show with 5,500 drones), sport (IPL, National Games, Northeast Olympic Games), brand launches (Tata, Mercedes, Amul, Paytm, Zomato, Godrej Properties, Amazon, Mahindra), and entertainment tours (Alan Walker, Martin Garrix, Karan Aujla) — set against ceremonial and government work such as Republic Day’s Beating Retreat and Rashtrapati Bhavan shows
• By geography: predominantly India, with international expansion since 2022 — Djibouti City (June 2022, the largest show in Africa at the time), Sri Lanka’s Lanka Premier League, and a 2025 Middle East push covering Oman, Kuwait’s Ya Hala festival (eight shows), a new Dubai office and a partnership with Oman’s ROADMAP
• The surprise: a company whose public identity rests on Republic Day and defence symbolism earns most of its money from private commerce — weddings, cricket and consumer brands — rather than from the state

The risks

• Talent scarcity: hardware, RF and firmware engineers are scarce in India, a constraint the company’s own leadership has flagged publicly, and one that limits how fast Botlab can scale its in-house design work (Electronics For You interview)
• Import dependency: motors, propellers and batteries are still sourced from abroad even though flight controllers and GPS units are built in-house, leaving unit costs exposed to currency swings and supply-chain disruption
• Revenue concentration in live events: with an estimated 99% of revenue tied to physical shows, the business carries weather cancellation, DGCA airspace-clearance and event-logistics risk that a pure software or product company would not face
• Execution risk in the newer defence line: Vayudh’s push into government contracts depends on slow-moving defence procurement cycles and continued iDEX programme support, a fundamentally different sales motion from booking a wedding or a cricket final

The takeaway

The lesson sits not in the 1,000-drone spectacle but in the unglamorous decision that made it possible. After a public failure in front of the Army chief in 2019, Botlab’s founders chose to rebuild a ₹40,000 imported GPS unit for about ₹8,000 themselves, and spent 15 iterations and 18 months getting a flight controller reliable enough to trust. Nobody was impressed by that work at the time; it produced no headlines. But it is what let the company go from 100 drones to 1,000 in six months when the government finally asked, and it is what a $55.96 million valuation and seven funding rounds later rests on. When a market has no dependable local supplier for the one component your product truly depends on, building it yourself first — slowly, before anyone is watching — is the less exciting but more defensible bet than chasing the show.

Frequently asked questions

What does Botlab Dynamics do?

Botlab Dynamics designs and flies choreographed drone swarms for events such as Republic Day’s Beating Retreat, weddings, cricket finals and brand launches, and separately builds indigenous defence and surveillance drones through its Vayudh division and sells drone components through BotLab Store.

When was Botlab Dynamics founded and by whom?

It was incorporated on 18 July 2016 at IIT Delhi’s Technology Business Incubator by Tanmay Bunkar, Anuj Kumar Barnwal and Dr Sarita Ahlawat.

How much funding has Botlab Dynamics raised, and what is it worth?

The company has raised a disclosed $14.3 million across seven rounds, according to Tracxn and TheCompanyCheck, and was valued at $55.96 million (~₹537 crore) as of April 2025, after Vayudh’s $10 million round led by Dharana Capital.

Is Botlab Dynamics profitable?

It reported a net profit of $598,950 in FY23, according to MCA-filing aggregator TheCompanyCheck. Its FY24 net margin was 19.07%, per Tofler. FY25 profit or loss has not been publicly disclosed as of September 2026.

What is Vayudh?

Vayudh is Botlab Dynamics’ defence-technology arm, developing indigenous surveillance drones such as the nano-drone Atri and the Vayusim training simulator under the government’s iDEX innovation programme. It raised $10 million in April 2025 led by Dharana Capital, with Zomato/Eternal founder Deepinder Goyal among the investors.

Sources

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

• Outlook Business, “How BotLab Dynamics Built India’s First Drone Swarm Powerhouse,” 2026
• The Better India, “Why Fruit Basket Makers Designed Drone Bodies for these IITians’ Startup,” 2022
• Electronics For You, “We Are Preparing To Fly Over 12,000 Drones In The Near Future — Sarita Ahlawat, Botlab Dynamics,” 2025
• Botlab Dynamics company blog, “10 Years of BotLab Dynamics: IIT Delhi to Global Drone Leader,” 2026
• Tracxn, “BotLab Dynamics — Company Profile, Funding and Investors,” accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, “Botlab Dynamics Private Limited — Company Profile,” accessed September 2026
• Tofler, “Botlab Dynamics Private Limited — Financials,” accessed September 2026
• PitchBook, “Botlab Dynamics 2026 Company Profile: Valuation, Funding & Investors,” accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “Vayudh raises $10 million in funding round led by Dharana Capital,” April 2025
• Bar and Bench, “Phoenix Legal, Kaizen law act on Vayudh fundraise,” April 2025
• The Print / ANI, “Drones made by IIT-Delhi-incubated startup BotLab Dynamics lit up sky at Beating Retreat ceremony,” February 2022

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