Startup Deep Dive : ideaForge — an IPO subscribed 106 times, then a 49% revenue crash

ideaForge Technology’s IPO was subscribed 106.06 times in June 2023, and the stock listed at a 94.2 percent premium on the BSE that July. Two years later, its revenue had fallen 49 percent in a single financial year, and the company was posting quarterly losses through most of 2025.

That is not the arc investors were sold. India’s best-known drone maker, the company behind the NETRA surveillance UAV used by the army and police since the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, is also a case study in what happens when a hardware business sells almost entirely to one buyer: the government. Revenue can double one year and halve the next, depending on when a single ministry signs a single order. ideaForge’s FY26 recovery, built on a last-quarter defence contract linked to Operation Sindoor, shows the pattern has not gone away — it has just turned favourable again, for now.

Quick facts

What they do

ideaForge designs, builds and sells unmanned aerial vehicles, principally to the Indian Army, Central Armed Police Forces, state police departments and other government agencies, with a smaller civil business selling to infrastructure, mining, mapping and disaster-management customers. Its flagship products are the NETRA, a hand-launched surveillance drone developed with India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation, and the SWITCH and Q6 families of hybrid vertical-take-off-and-landing UAVs built for longer-range tactical reconnaissance. Around the hardware sits a software layer — flight-planning and mission-control tools such as BlueFire Touch and an analytics platform called IntelSight — plus training, spares and repair services sold to the same customer base after the drones are delivered.

The origin

The idea did not start as a defence project. Rahul Singh first conceived it in 2004 at IIT Bombay as a hovercraft for Powai Lake; the concept evolved into a quadrotor prototype he built with fellow students Ankit Mehta and Ashish Bhat. The three incorporated ideaForge on 8 February 2007, working out of the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, IIT Bombay’s technology incubator, and initially aimed the multi-rotor platform at aerial imaging and surveillance rather than any specific defence customer. Mehta held a dual mechanical-engineering degree from IIT Bombay, Singh a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, and Bhat a bachelor’s in electrical engineering — an engineering-first team building a category, quadcopters and VTOL UAVs for Indian use, that essentially did not exist commercially in India at the time.

The struggle years

ideaForge’s hardest years were not about the technology working — they were about nobody wanting to fund it or, later, buy it. By 2014 the company had delivered roughly 70 drones to government agencies and had working, proven hardware, yet venture capital stayed away for years afterward; a case study of the company by AJuniorVC quotes the difficulty of that period as investors treating ideaForge “like a tiger at a zoo — people wanted to admire it from a distance but not go near it,” put off by the combination of hardware capital intensity and near-total dependence on slow-moving government buyers. Separately, India’s regulatory environment turned openly hostile: private drone flying was banned in 2017, followed by tighter homeland-security flight restrictions, and normal commercial operations were effectively frozen until the rules were relaxed in 2018. A company built entirely around flying UAVs spent roughly a year unable to legally demonstrate its own product to many prospective customers. The pattern repeated in a different form far more recently — FY25 (year ended March 2025) saw ideaForge’s revenue fall 49 percent to about ₹161 crore as defence procurement stalled through India’s 2024 general election cycle, proof that even after listing, the underlying fragility of relying on government tender timing had not been engineered away.

The turning point

The event that redirected the company was not a funding round or a product launch — it was the 26 November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. The founders have described watching naval helicopters attempt aerial reconnaissance over the besieged Taj Hotel and concluding that a small, quiet, hand-launched drone would have done that job better and more safely. The attacks reoriented ideaForge’s roadmap away from a broader commercial-imaging pitch and toward building specifically for the armed forces, central and state police, and disaster-response agencies — the customer base that has generated most of its revenue ever since. That single strategic pivot, made in the aftermath of a national security failure rather than a market study, is the reason ideaForge is a defence-and-homeland-security company today rather than a generalist drone maker chasing agriculture or delivery use cases.

The money behind it

ideaForge raised a reported $33.35 million in venture funding across five rounds before going public, according to CB Insights, well below what many hardware start-ups of its age raised, consistent with the AJuniorVC account of investors staying cautious for years. Infosys led a $1.5 million seed round in 2016, an unusual corporate-backed vote of confidence for an early defence-hardware maker with no consumer product. Qualcomm Asia Pacific joined in ideaForge’s 2016 Series A alongside Celesta Capital, and stayed in as one of the largest anchor investors ahead of the 2023 IPO, committing roughly ₹70.9 crore in that anchor round according to IPO documentation compiled by Chittorgarh — a rare case of an investor backing the company across both its private and public life. Florintree Enterprises, the investment vehicle backed by Mathew Cyriac, built the largest single external stake in the company, at around 12 percent, and remains among its most significant shareholders post-listing. In June 2023, days before the IPO opened, ideaForge closed a ₹60 crore pre-IPO placement that valued the company at about ₹2,500 crore, with investors including Tata AIG General Insurance, 360 One Asset Management and Motilal Oswal Mutual Fund, according to YourStory. The IPO itself, on 26-30 June 2023, raised ₹567.24 crore in total — ₹240.02 crore as a fresh issue and ₹327.22 crore as an offer for sale — priced at ₹672 a share, and was subscribed 106.06 times overall, with the retail portion alone covered 85.2 times, per data compiled by Chittorgarh. Shares listed on the BSE on 7 July 2023 at ₹1,305.10, a 94.2 percent premium to the issue price.

How it makes money

The core of ideaForge’s revenue is straightforward: it manufactures UAV systems in-house and sells them, largely through competitive and emergency-procurement tenders, to defence and police buyers, with civil customers in mapping, mining and infrastructure making up a smaller slice. Around that hardware sale, the company also earns from its BlueFire Touch and IntelSight software, from drone-as-a-service contracts where it supplies pilots and equipment for a mapping or surveillance project rather than selling the hardware outright, and from spares, repair and maintenance work on drones already in the field. The part outsiders consistently get wrong is treating this as a simple manufacturing margin business: because nearly every big-ticket sale goes through government procurement, the real constraint on ideaForge’s earnings is not unit economics but working capital and timing — government customers pay slowly, and in FY23 the company’s receivable days ran past 500, according to the AJuniorVC case study, meaning cash from a sale can trail the sale itself by well over a year. That is also why a single order’s delivery date can move a full fiscal year’s revenue by tens of percentage points in either direction, something a components or industrial-hardware seller with a diversified private-sector customer base would rarely experience.

The numbers

The shape of this table, not any single year, is the real story: revenue and profit both peaked in FY24, then revenue nearly halved and the company swung to a loss in FY25, before a partial recovery in FY26, according to consolidated figures compiled by Screener.in and corroborated by ScanX Trade’s reporting of a roughly 36.7 percent revenue rise and a net loss narrowing to about ₹17-20 crore in FY26. Within FY26 itself the swings were sharper still: ideaForge posted a Q1 FY26 (April-June 2025) net loss of ₹21.7 crore on revenue of just ₹12.78 crore, down 85 percent from the same quarter a year earlier when a batch of large defence deliveries had inflated the base, according to Entrackr. The company then ran consecutive quarterly losses through December 2025, before a fourth-quarter defence order tied to the Rs 137 crore Indian Army contract flipped it to a ₹59.99 crore net profit on ₹153.49 crore of revenue in the March 2026 quarter, per Multibagg’s coverage of the results — a single quarter accounting for roughly two-thirds of the year’s total revenue.

Where the money comes from

ideaForge’s business is overwhelmingly a domestic, government-facing one, and the surprise is how concentrated that dependence is on a handful of large, lumpy contracts rather than a steady drumbeat of smaller orders. The clearest recent illustration is the Rs 137 crore contract the Indian Army awarded ideaForge in mid-2025 through an emergency-procurement route, for hybrid Mini UAV systems that had been battle-tested during Operation Sindoor for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, as reported by The Print. That single contract — part of a roughly Rs 40,000 crore emergency-procurement drive the defence ministry approved after the operation — was large enough on its own to be the difference between a loss-making and a profit-making quarter for a company with roughly ₹226 crore in annual revenue. The Print also noted a tightening of sourcing rules attached to such contracts: critical subsystems must now come from non-border-sharing nations, part of the defence ministry’s push to strip Chinese-origin components out of Indian UAV supply chains, a requirement that favours an India-manufacturing incumbent like ideaForge but adds compliance and sourcing complexity to future bids.

The risks

First, revenue and cash-flow lumpiness tied to government procurement cycles is structural, not incidental — FY25’s 49 percent revenue fall during an election-year procurement slowdown and FY26’s recovery riding on a single quarter’s emergency army order are two sides of the same mechanism, and the receivable days exceeding 500 in FY23, noted by AJuniorVC, show that even when an order lands, the cash can take well over a year to arrive. Second, customer concentration: with defence and police buyers accounting for the large majority of revenue, the loss, delay or renegotiation of even one or two big tenders can move full-year results by tens of percent, a dependence that a civil or export order book has not yet meaningfully offset. Third, rising competition and tightening compliance: India’s push for domestic drone manufacturing under schemes like the production-linked incentive programme has drawn in rival Indian UAV makers, while new defence-procurement rules requiring components to be sourced from non-border-sharing countries — a response to Chinese-origin parts in the sector — raise the cost and complexity of qualifying for the same tenders ideaForge depends on, even as they also keep out some lower-cost competitors.

The takeaway

ideaForge’s history argues that being technologically first in a category is not the same as having a repeatable business, if the only customer who can buy at scale moves on its own clock. The company built working drones years before it had a market, survived a regulatory ban on flying them at all, and still — sixteen years after a national tragedy handed it a clear mission — reports a fiscal year’s results that can swing from a near-halving of revenue to a single-quarter profit turnaround depending on when one ministry signs one contract. The transferable lesson is not that defence technology is a bad business; it is that a single-customer-type business needs either a genuinely diversified order book or a treasury built to absorb multi-year payment delays, and ideaForge, even after an IPO and three years of public reporting, is still working toward both.

Frequently asked questions

Is ideaForge Technology profitable?

Not for the full year. ideaForge posted a consolidated net loss of approximately ₹17-20 crore in FY26 (year ended March 2026), an improvement on the roughly ₹62 crore loss in FY25, helped by a profitable fourth quarter, according to figures compiled by Screener.in and ScanX Trade.

Who founded ideaForge, and why?

Ankit Mehta, Rahul Singh and Ashish Bhat, all IIT Bombay graduates, incorporated ideaForge on 8 February 2007, initially working on multi-rotor aerial platforms before the 26 November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks pushed the company to focus specifically on drones for defence and homeland security.

When did ideaForge list, and how did the IPO go?

ideaForge’s IPO ran from 26 to 30 June 2023, was priced at ₹672 a share, and was subscribed 106.06 times overall. It listed on the BSE on 7 July 2023 at ₹1,305.10, a premium of 94.2 percent to the issue price, according to IPO data compiled by Chittorgarh and reporting by Zeebiz.

Why did ideaForge’s revenue fall so sharply after its IPO?

Revenue fell 49 percent in FY25 (year ended March 2025) largely because Indian defence procurement slowed during the 2024 general election cycle, delaying orders that later resumed; the pattern repeated within FY26 itself, when a weak first three quarters were followed by a large fourth-quarter army order that swung the year back to a smaller loss.

What is ideaForge’s market value now?

Approximately ₹3,600-3,630 crore as of 18 September 2026, according to Screener.in and stockanalysis.com, down from the roughly ₹2,500 crore private valuation it carried just before its 2023 IPO but well below the peaks the stock touched immediately after listing.

Sources

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

• Wikipedia, “IdeaForge Technology”, accessed September 2026
• IIT Bombay Alumni Association (acr.iitbombay.org), “ideaForge – IIT Bombay Alumni’s Drone Company Goes Public and Becomes the 7th Largest Drone Company in the World”, accessed September 2026
• AJuniorVC, “Can 5,000 Cr ideaForge Forge India’s Drone Dreams?”, accessed September 2026
• Chittorgarh, “ideaForge Technology IPO Date, Price, GMP, Review, Details”, accessed September 2026
• Zeebiz, “ideaForge Tech IPO listing: Shares make a stellar debut; here’s what investors may do”, July 2023
• YourStory, “IdeaForge concludes pre-IPO placement at Rs 2,500 Cr valuation”, June 2023
• Screener.in, “Ideaforge Technology Ltd” consolidated financials, accessed September 2026
• stockanalysis.com, “ideaForge Technology (NSE:IDEAFORGE) Market Cap & Net Worth”, accessed September 2026
• ScanX Trade, “IdeaForge Technology narrows net loss to ₹199.36 million in FY26”, accessed September 2026
• ScanX Trade, “ideaForge Technology 19th AGM on Aug 5, 2026; FY26 Revenue Rises 36.71%”, accessed September 2026
• Entrackr, “Ideaforge revenue nosedives 85% in Q1 FY26”, 2025
• Multibagg, “ideaForge Q4 FY26 Results: Sales jump 594%, profit ₹59.99 cr”, 2026
• The Print, “ideaForge bags Rs 137 cr deal to supply surveillance drones battle-tested during Op Sindoor to Army”, 2025
• Trendlyne / Choice India, “Ideaforge Technology Shareholding Pattern”, accessed September 2026
• CB Insights (via Clay.com company dossier), “How Much Did ideaForge Raise? Funding & Key Investors”, accessed September 2026

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