Startup Deep Dive : Garuda Aerospace — near-bankrupt in 2020, now chasing a Rs 1,000 crore IPO

Garuda Aerospace builds drones that spray fertiliser on Indian farms and patrol borders for the armed forces, but in January 2020 the company was close to shutting down altogether. Five years on, the same startup raised ₹100 crore (about $10.4 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, Trading Economics, 18 September 2026) at a reported $250 million valuation in April 2025, and by August 2026 it had SEBI’s approval to raise ₹1,000 crore in an initial public offering.

The gap between those two moments is the story: a Chennai swimmer-turned-founder who pivoted a near-dead drone company into a COVID sanitisation service, rode a chance Elon Musk “like” into his first serious cheque, and then built a drone-as-a-service business that now says it holds roughly a quarter of India’s drone market, on the strength of government schemes as much as private demand. Whether that mix survives the scrutiny of public markets is the open question this piece tries to answer.

Quick facts

What they do

Garuda Aerospace designs, manufactures and operates drones, and sells the flying itself as a service rather than only the hardware. Its best-known product is the Kisan drone, a sub-25kg agricultural drone that sprays fertiliser and pesticide for farmers and self-help groups under the government’s Namo Drone Didi programme. Alongside agriculture, the company builds surveillance and border-patrol drones such as the Trishul for the armed forces and paramilitary buyers, runs drone survey and mapping work for state governments and infrastructure clients, and operates a DGCA-approved Remote Pilot Training Organisation that certifies drone pilots. The common thread is India’s drone-as-a-service model: instead of buying a machine outright, a farmer cooperative, a state land-records department or a corporate client pays for the flight hours, the spraying job or the survey output, and Garuda keeps the drone, the pilot and the maintenance.

The origin

Agnishwar Jayaprakash was not an aerospace engineer by training. Before starting Garuda Aerospace, he was a competitive swimmer who set six national records at the 2012 World Short Course Championships in Istanbul, and later studied at Harvard Business School, according to his own biography as reported by Wikipedia and industry profiles. He founded Garuda Aerospace in 2015 in Chennai with Rithika Mohan, who is now the company’s co-founder and whole-time director, betting that Indian agriculture was overdue for cheap, made-in-India drones rather than imported ones. The founding insight was narrow and practical: farmers needed a way to spray and survey large fields faster than manual labour allowed, and existing drones on the market were priced for defence and cinematography budgets, not for a two-acre plot in Tamil Nadu.

The struggle years

The idea did not translate into a business quickly. By January 2020, five years after founding, Garuda Aerospace was, in Jayaprakash’s own later telling as reported in the Indian press, on the verge of shutting down. Orders were thin, drones for agriculture were still a hard sell to conservative buyers, and the company had not found a large paying customer. The turnaround did not come from the agriculture pitch it had built the company on. It came from an unrelated public health emergency: when COVID-19 hit India in 2020, Jayaprakash proposed repurposing Garuda’s drones to spray disinfectant over government buildings and public spaces. The pivot did not immediately produce large official contracts, but the media coverage it generated kept the company visible at a moment when it had almost run out of road.

The turning point

The single event that changed Garuda’s trajectory was not a government contract but a tweet. Jayaprakash’s social media activity around the pandemic drone story drew a “like” from Elon Musk, and that attention, according to reporting by drone-industry outlet Bots and Drones and corroborated in later profiles, caught the eye of UK-based investor Silver Swan Investments. That connection led to Garuda’s first serious institutional cheque, a $1 million seed investment, at a point when the company had no comparable funding history to point to. It is a thin, almost accidental hinge for a company now seeking a stock-exchange listing, but multiple accounts of Garuda’s history place it at the centre of the turnaround: without that cheque, the company would have entered the 2021-22 agri-drone policy wave with no capital to build out its Kisan drone line.

The money behind it

Garuda’s funding history is a step-ladder of small, escalating rounds rather than one landmark raise. A $22 million Series A closed in February 2023, led by SphitiCap, giving the company its first real manufacturing capital. That was followed by a ₹25 crore bridge round in October 2023 from Venture Catalysts and We Founder Circle, and then the largest round to date: a ₹100 crore raise in April 2025, led by Venture Catalysts, at a reported $250 million valuation, according to both StartupTalky and Indian Startup News/Business Today, which independently reported the same figure. Entrackr’s financial database, citing TheKredible, put Garuda’s cumulative funding at approximately $44 million across its rounds as of 2025. Two named backers changed the company’s fortunes in different ways. Venture Catalysts moved from a bridge lender to the lead investor steering the company toward its largest private round and, later, its IPO process. MS Dhoni is the more unusual name on the cap table: the former India cricket captain first invested an estimated ₹10 crore for a 1-2% stake and became brand ambassador in May 2022, then topped up his investment in October 2024, according to ANI and Arthnova’s reporting on his shareholding, which pegged the increase at up to roughly ₹60 crore across three years. The April 2025 round was earmarked, per the company’s own statement to StartupTalky, for a new 35,000 sq ft Chennai facility for component manufacturing, an R&D and defence-drone testing centre, and reducing import dependency, a theme that recurs later in this piece as a risk rather than a solved problem.

How it makes money

Garuda earns in two distinct ways that outsiders often collapse into one. The first is drone sales and accessories: it manufactures and sells the physical hardware, more than 30 models by its own count, to government agencies, corporates and individual buyers. The second, larger stream is what the company calls drone-as-a-service: charging for spraying, surveying, mapping and surveillance flights using drones it owns and pilots it employs or trains. This is the part people get wrong about Garuda. Because its public image is built around manufacturing milestones and DGCA type certificates, it is easy to assume hardware sales are the core business, but Garuda’s own FY24 financial filings, as reported by Entrackr, show operating and surveillance services outgrew hardware sales, generating ₹68 crore against ₹42 crore from drone sales that year, a 143% jump in the services line alone. The margin sits in the service contracts, where Garuda controls pricing on flight-hours and subscription-style spraying packages, rather than in one-off hardware sales, which face rising material costs as the company imports components. Cost of materials rose from ₹9 crore in FY23 to ₹49 crore in FY24 and to ₹56 crore in FY25, a bigger and bigger share of the cost base as the company scales manufacturing, per Entrackr’s FY25 report.

The numbers

All figures below are revenue from operations and profit after tax in ₹ crore, as reported by Entrackr from Garuda Aerospace’s regulatory filings.

Revenue more than doubled from FY23 to FY24, a 2.3x jump, but growth slowed sharply to 7.3% between FY24 and FY25, even as profit kept rising, up 9.4% to ₹17.5 crore. Entrackr’s FY25 report also flagged an EBITDA margin of 22.4% and a return on capital employed of 14.37%, down from 20.72% in FY24, alongside a thin cash balance of ₹4.6 crore against current assets of ₹179 crore, meaning much of the company’s asset base sits in receivables and inventory rather than cash on hand. Total income, including other income, was ₹125 crore in FY25 against total expenses of ₹100.5 crore.

Where the money comes from

By segment, Garuda’s FY24 numbers show the services side of the business, spraying, surveying and operating drones for clients, contributing ₹68 crore, or roughly 62% of that year’s revenue, against ₹42 crore, or roughly 38%, from selling drones and accessories outright, according to Entrackr’s breakdown. The surprise is less about the split itself and more about its direction: a company whose public narrative is manufacturing-led (DGCA type certificates, new factories, 30-plus drone models) is earning the majority of its money from running drones as a rental-and-service business, closer to a fleet operator than a hardware maker. Geographically and by client type, Garuda’s business leans heavily on government-linked demand: the Namo Drone Didi scheme secured it orders for 500 Kisan drones from ten fertiliser companies in February 2024, according to sUAS News, and the company has separately reported training more than 185 rural women as drone pilots under related state and central schemes. Corporate and defence-adjacent clients, including work referencing DRDO and the armed forces for its Trishul border-patrol drone, sit alongside this agricultural base, but the company’s own public materials and the scheme-linked order flow point to state and central government programmes as the larger, steadier channel.

The risks

Three risks stand out, two of which Garuda has already lived through rather than merely disclosed. The first is supply-chain dependence on a rival. In June 2023, Garuda alleged that ideaForge, another Indian drone maker, disabled the software on 15 drones Garuda had bought and fully paid for at a cost of ₹2.2 crore, without prior notice, according to reporting by LiveLaw on the resulting criminal case. Garuda said the disabled drones caused it to lose a project with the Odisha state government, which then blacklisted the company over the failure; the Madras High Court subsequently refused to quash the cheating case Garuda had filed against ideaForge, finding sufficient material to proceed. Whatever the eventual verdict, the episode shows a structural risk: Garuda’s own hardware fleet was, at least in that instance, dependent on a competitor’s proprietary software, and a single vendor dispute translated directly into a lost government contract and a blacklisting. The second risk is import dependence on the very supply chain Garuda’s PLI-scheme funding is meant to fix. Despite years of “Make in India” positioning, 45-55% of the critical components in Indian-made drones, including high-end imaging sensors and flight-controller semiconductors, are still imported, largely from China and Japan, according to the founder’s own comments reported by WireUnwired; Garuda opened an agri-drone indigenisation facility in June 2025 to address this, per DroneLife, but the gap has not closed yet. The third risk is policy concentration: a meaningful share of Garuda’s order book, from the 500-drone fertiliser-company order to its women-pilot training programmes, runs through central schemes like Namo Drone Didi, SMAM subsidies and the drone PLI scheme, so a change in scheme funding, eligibility rules or political priority would hit demand directly rather than through a diversified private customer base.

The takeaway

Garuda Aerospace’s arc is a reminder that a company can be simultaneously fragile and compounding. It survived on the strength of one lucky tweet and one pandemic pivot, and it still runs on government scheme orders and imported sensors it has not fully replaced. But it converted each of those fragile inputs, a celebrity’s stake, a state’s spraying contract, a training mandate, into the next contract, rather than treating them as one-off wins. The lesson for anyone studying it is not that near-death experiences build resilience by themselves; it is that a founder who keeps turning attention and small cheques into repeatable service contracts can out-compound a better-funded but less relationship-driven rival, right up until the day public markets ask him to prove the model works without a tailwind.

Frequently asked questions

What does Garuda Aerospace actually make?

Garuda Aerospace manufactures agricultural, surveillance and defence-oriented drones, including its Kisan drone for spraying and crop monitoring and the Trishul border-patrol drone, and it also operates a drone-as-a-service business, charging clients for spraying, survey and mapping flights rather than only selling hardware.

Who founded Garuda Aerospace and when?

Agnishwar Jayaprakash founded Garuda Aerospace in 2015 in Chennai, alongside co-founder Rithika Mohan, who now serves as a whole-time director.

Is MS Dhoni a shareholder in Garuda Aerospace?

Yes. The former India cricket captain invested an estimated ₹10 crore for a 1-2% stake and became brand ambassador in May 2022, and reportedly increased his holding in October 2024, according to ANI and other Indian business media.

What is Garuda Aerospace’s current valuation?

Garuda Aerospace was valued at a reported $250 million in its ₹100 crore Series B round in April 2025, according to StartupTalky and Indian Startup News/Business Today. Its planned IPO is reportedly targeting a valuation in the ₹4,000-5,000 crore range, though this figure will only be confirmed once the company’s red herring prospectus is public.

Is Garuda Aerospace going public, and when?

The company confidentially pre-filed its draft red herring prospectus with SEBI on 31 March 2026, filed the DRHP on 7 April 2026, and received SEBI’s final observations, effectively regulatory approval, on 5 August 2026, for an issue targeting around ₹1,000 crore. A listing is expected by December 2026, though IPO timelines are routinely revised.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Garuda Aerospace revenue and profit soar over 2X in FY24”, 2024
• Entrackr, “Garuda Aerospace posts Rs 17.5 Cr profit in FY25, revenue at Rs 118 Cr”, 2026
• StartupTalky, “Garuda Aerospace Secures INR 100 Crore at $250M Valuation”, April 2025
• Indian Startup News / Business Today, “MS Dhoni-backed Garuda Aerospace raises Rs 100 crore in funding at $250 million valuation”, April 2025
• AgroTech Space, “Garuda Aerospace Secures Rs 100 Crore to Deepen Its Drone Capabilities”, April 2025
• ANI News, “MS Dhoni Rejoins Garuda Aerospace as Brand Ambassador & Tops up investment into Drone Startup”, October 2024
• Inc42, “MS Dhoni Invests In Drone Startup Garuda Aerospace, Joins As Brand Ambassador”, 2022
• Arthnova, “MS Dhoni’s Garuda Aerospace Investment: Rs 10 Cr to Rs 60 Cr in 3 Years”, 2026
• Business Standard / Entrepreneur India, DGCA Type Certification and RPTO approval reporting, December 2022
• DroneLife, “Garuda Aerospace Secures Key DGCA Certifications for Drone Manufacturing and Training”, October 2024
• DroneLife, “Garuda Aerospace’s Kisan Drone: Revolutionizing Indian Agriculture Under PM Modi’s Drone Didi Scheme”, March 2024
• sUAS News, “MS Dhoni backed Garuda Aerospace Secures Orders for 500 Kisan Drones Under NaMo Drone Didi Initiative”, February 2024
• LiveLaw, “Madras High Court Refuses To Quash Cheating Case Against Drone Manufacturing Company, Says Sufficient Material To Proceed”, 2025
• WireUnwired, “India Banned Foreign Drones But Still Imports 45-55% Of Critical Components”, 2026
• DroneLife, “Garuda Aerospace Opens India’s First Agri-Drone Indigenization Facility”, June 2025
• Kotak Neo, “Garuda Aerospace IPO: Company Files DRHP Confidentially”, 2026
• Angel One, “Upcoming IPO: Garuda Aerospace Filed DRHP with SEBI via Confidential Route”, 2026
• Inc42, “Dronetech Startup Garuda Aerospace Gets SEBI Nod For Rs 750 Cr+ IPO”, August 2026
• Wikipedia, “Agnishwar Jayaprakash”, accessed September 2026
• Bots and Drones, “Elon Musk’s ‘like’, a $1-m boon for Garuda Aerospace”
• Crunchbase and Business Today, Rithika Mohan co-founder profile, May 2026

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