Site icon The Invincible India

Startup Deep Dive : DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations — a third of a year’s revenue was fictitious

The Invincible India
The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations.

DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations built its whole public image on being first: India’s first listed drone company, on the BSE SME platform since December 2022. For three years that label mostly held up. Then, on 28 November 2025, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) said close to a third of one year’s revenue never actually happened.

SEBI’s order found that DroneAcharya had booked ₹12.35 crore (~$1.3 million) of fictitious FY24 sales to two firms, Triconix and IRed, that received no goods or services at all. Strip that out, and a year the company reported as profitable turns into a loss. This is the story of how a Pune college dropout’s GIS side-project became a stock market darling backed by Aamir Khan and Ranbir Kapoor, and how a regulator’s forensic reading of its books turned that story upside down.

Quick facts

Company DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations Limited
Founded Incorporated 10 March 2017, Pune; converted to a public company 23 August 2022
Founder(s) Prateek Srivastava (Chairman & Managing Director) and Nikita Srivastava
Businesses Drone survey and mapping, DGCA-certified pilot training, defence and FPV drones, drone manufacturing and sales
Latest FY revenue ₹18.27 crore total revenue, FY26 (year ended 31 March 2026)
Latest FY profit/loss ₹0.37 crore net profit, FY26 — a turnaround from a ₹13.47 crore loss in FY25
Listed BSE SME platform, 23 December 2022 (BSE scrip code 543713)
Market value ~₹82 crore as of 25 September 2026
Key shareholders Promoters Prateek and Nikita Srivastava (~28.2%); investor Shankar Sharma holds 1.91%

What they do

DroneAcharya sells three overlapping things under one roof: drones and drone-based data services (survey, mapping, agricultural spraying, surveillance and underwater inspection) sold to state governments, infrastructure firms, mining and energy companies and the armed forces; DGCA-certified remote-pilot training delivered through its own Remote Pilot Training Organisations (RPTOs), aimed at students, farmers and career-changers chasing a licence in India’s newly opened drone economy; and, more recently, defence-tech hardware — FPV and loitering “kamikaze” drones built for the Indian armed forces and paramilitary buyers. The common thread, as the company frames it on its own site, is turning aerial and geospatial data into something a government department or a company can act on.

The origin

Prateek Srivastava is not a drone hobbyist who stumbled into a company. He holds a master’s degree in remote sensing and GIS from the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand (2007–2009), and spent his early career at geospatial and drone firms including Genesys International, PrecisionHawk and Terra Drone India, before founding an earlier venture, RedBay UAV System Services. That is the founding insight behind DroneAcharya, incorporated on 10 March 2017: India had almost no organised pipeline of people who could actually fly a survey-grade drone and turn its output into usable maps, at a moment when the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) was about to start licensing civilian drone pilots for the first time. Srivastava built a training-and-services business to sit at that exact chokepoint, betting that regulation, not just technology, would create the market.

The struggle years

The version of this story DroneAcharya tells in its investor material is a straight line from a 2017 startup to a 2022 stock market listing. The real path had at least two moments that should have worried anyone reading the fine print.

The first came right after the money arrived, not before it. DroneAcharya raised ₹33.97 crore in its December 2022 IPO, of which ₹27.99 crore was earmarked specifically for buying drones and accessories to scale up its services business. According to SEBI’s November 2025 order, only ₹70 lakh of that was actually spent on drones; the remaining ₹27.28 crore sat undeployed in fixed deposits that were never disclosed to shareholders as a change of plan. Separately, SEBI flagged undisclosed transfers of ₹10.8 crore to a related entity, Awyam Synergies, between June and December 2022 — money moving out of the business at the same time it was telling the public it needed capital to buy hardware.

The second came almost three years later, when the accounting caught up with the business. FY25 revenue held roughly flat at ₹34.52 crore, but the company swung to a net loss of ₹13.47 crore, driven by a ₹13.03 crore expected-credit-loss provision under Ind AS — an accounting admission that a large chunk of revenue booked in earlier years was not, in fact, going to be collected. That provision, disclosed in the company’s own FY25 results filed with the BSE in September 2025, is the balance-sheet echo of the fictitious billing SEBI would describe in detail two months later.

The turning point

The single event that reframed DroneAcharya’s public story is SEBI’s order of 28 November 2025. Before it: a company trading as high as ₹67.6 in the preceding year, marketed as India’s first listed drone company, that had told the market its FY24 net profit was ₹6.2–8.44 crore (figures vary slightly between the company’s own release and the number cited in SEBI’s order) on revenue that had grown roughly 90% year on year. After it: SEBI found that ₹12.35 crore, or close to 35%, of that FY24 revenue came from two counterparties, Triconix and IRed, that received no actual goods or services — some of the billing addresses traced back to households and unrelated shops. Strip out those entries and, per SEBI’s own recalculation, FY24 would have shown a loss of ₹3.91 crore instead of a profit.

The market reaction was immediate. Shares fell 20% to hit the lower circuit at ₹36.31 on 1–2 December 2025, and market capitalisation dropped to roughly ₹108.86 crore, a stock that was already down more than 60% year-to-date at that point. SEBI barred the company, its promoters Prateek and Nikita Srivastava, and several associated entities and advisors from accessing the securities market for up to two years, alongside monetary penalties totalling ₹75 lakh. The company has said it will appeal to the Securities Appellate Tribunal.

The money behind it

DroneAcharya never raised institutional venture capital in the way most startups do. Its capital came from two public-market-adjacent rounds instead:

The IPO itself was a market event in its own right. It was oversubscribed a reported 178.5 times overall (Chittorgarh), with some sources citing figures as high as 243.7 times; the retail portion alone was subscribed around 330 times (Business Today). Shares listed on 23 December 2022 at roughly double the issue price — a gain Chittorgarh puts at 98.3% (open ₹102, close ₹107.10 against a ₹54 issue price), while contemporary coverage described it more loosely as a “90%” listing pop. There has been no subsequent primary fundraising of comparable size; the December 2022 IPO remains the company’s last major capital raise, and the 2025 SEBI order now means the company and its promoters cannot access the market for fresh capital until the ban lifts.

How it makes money

DroneAcharya earns in three ways, and the mix has shifted hard within a single year:

The margin story in FY26 is really a cost story rather than a revenue one: total consolidated expenses fell from ₹54.64 crore in FY25 to ₹17.77 crore in FY26 even as revenue from operations nearly halved, producing an EBITDA margin of 48.39% on a much smaller base. The part outsiders get wrong is treating DroneAcharya as a single “drone company” with one take rate; in reality its FY24 profitability depended partly on service and product revenue that SEBI later found was partly fabricated, and its FY26 profitability depended on cutting costs faster than revenue fell — two very different ways of getting to a positive bottom line in consecutive years.

The numbers

Fiscal year (ended 31 March) Revenue from operations (₹ crore) Net profit / (loss) (₹ crore)
FY23 18.57 3.43
FY24 35.19 (as originally reported; SEBI found ~35% not genuine) 6.18–8.44 (as originally reported)
FY25 34.52 (13.47)
FY26 14.67 0.37

Where the money comes from

DroneAcharya does not publish a segment-wise revenue split by product line in the sources reviewed for this piece, so any precise percentage breakdown between training, survey/mapping and defence would be a guess — and this piece cuts guesses. What is verifiable is the channel and geography mix:

The risks

The takeaway

The lesson in DroneAcharya’s arc is not really about drones. It is that a listing pop and a celebrity cap table are proof of appetite, not proof of a business. India’s SME exchange platform let a young, small company raise capital and get marked up 98% on day one, on the strength of a growth story that outran what its own accounts could support three years later. For any founder chasing a similar route, the discipline that matters is the boring kind: matching what you tell the exchange about how proceeds will be used to what you actually do with the cash, because the gap between the two is exactly what a regulator will eventually measure.

Frequently asked questions

What does DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations actually sell?

Drone-based survey, mapping and inspection services and hardware sold to governments and companies; DGCA-certified drone pilot training through its own training organisations; and, more recently, FPV and defence-oriented drones for military and paramilitary buyers.

Is DroneAcharya’s FY24 profit figure reliable?

No, not as originally reported. SEBI’s order of 28 November 2025 found that ₹12.35 crore, or about 35%, of FY24 revenue came from two entities that received no actual goods or services; recalculated without that revenue, FY24 would have been a ₹3.91 crore loss rather than a reported profit.

Who are DroneAcharya’s most notable investors?

Actors Aamir Khan (about ₹25 lakh for 46,600 shares) and Ranbir Kapoor (about ₹20 lakh for 37,200 shares) invested in the February–June 2022 pre-IPO round, alongside market veteran Shankar Sharma, who holds a 1.91% stake.

What happened to DroneAcharya’s IPO proceeds?

Of the ₹33.97 crore raised in December 2022, ₹27.99 crore was earmarked for buying drones, but SEBI found only ₹70 lakh was actually spent on that purpose, with ₹27.28 crore left undeployed in fixed deposits that were not disclosed to shareholders as a change in use of proceeds.

Is DroneAcharya profitable now?

Yes, on its most recent filed results. FY26 (year ended March 2026) showed a net profit of ₹0.37 crore, reversing a ₹13.47 crore loss in FY25, though revenue from operations fell 57.5% to ₹14.67 crore over the same period, so the return to profit came mainly from cost cuts rather than growth.

Sources

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

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.

Exit mobile version