In the year to March 2025, a Pune defence-technology company most Indians have never heard of turned ₹100.97 crore of operating income into ₹33.34 crore of after-tax profit — a 33.0% net margin that would flatter a software firm, earned by a business that, at its core, builds boats. Sagar Defence Engineering did it by selling the Indian Navy something no foreign supplier would hand over: boats that steer, patrol and, in one programme, fight without a crew aboard.
The audited numbers, published by CARE Ratings in October 2025, tell a sharper story than any pitch deck. Revenue rose from ₹7.85 crore in FY22 to ₹100.97 crore in FY25, and the order book stood at ₹2,730 crore (about $284 million) as on 30 September 2025 — roughly 27 times a single year’s sales. This is the anatomy of how a merchant-navy captain’s side project became a company reportedly weighing a public listing, and where the risks still sit.
Quick facts
| Company | Sagar Defence Engineering Private Limited (CIN U29253MH2015PTC264539); files DRHP-stage documents as it converts toward a public listing |
| Founded | Incorporated May 2015, Maharashtra |
| Founder(s) | Captain Nikunj Parashar (Managing Director, ex-merchant navy); co-founders Mridul Babbar (CFO) and Lakshay Dang (CTO), both formerly with NASA (per CARE Ratings, October 2025) |
| Businesses | Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), autonomous weaponised boat swarms, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), unmanned aerial and ground vehicles, and heavy-lift aerial platforms — built on its patented Genisys “Boat in a Box” autonomy stack |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹100.97 crore total operating income in FY25 (audited, CARE Ratings); reported ₹254.59 crore in FY26 (Tracxn, MCA-derived, awaiting confirmation in audited filings) |
| Latest FY profit | ₹33.34 crore PAT in FY25 (audited), a 33.0% PAT margin, up from ₹3.46 crore in FY24 |
| Listed | Private; reported to be preparing an IPO of ₹2,000–3,000 crore (Venture Intelligence) |
| Market value / last valuation | Reported ~$373 million post its March 2026 round (PitchBook, aggregator estimate, unconfirmed) |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Captain Nikunj Parashar (MD); backers include ONGC’s start-up arm, Maharashtra Defence and Aerospace Venture Fund, and Skegen |
What they do
Sagar Defence Engineering designs, builds and deploys uncrewed and autonomous machines that move on water, under it, in the air and on land — and sells them mainly to the Indian government’s defence buyers. As CARE Ratings describes the entity, it operates across the maritime, aerial, underwater and land domains, with a portfolio spanning:
- Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) for surveillance, survey and interdiction.
- Autonomous weaponised boat swarms (AWBS) for naval missions.
- Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with autonomous launch and recovery from high-speed moving platforms.
- Heavy-lift aerial platforms and personal aerial vehicles aimed at both defence and commercial logistics.
The common thread is the company’s indigenously developed, patented autonomy platform, marketed as Genisys “Boat in a Box” — software and hardware that let a vessel navigate and complete a mission with no one aboard. Its stated customers are the Ministry of Defence and, within it, the Indian Navy, Indian Coast Guard and DRDO (CARE Ratings, October 2025).
The origin
The founding insight was a gap in a shopping list. Captain Nikunj Parashar spent his early career at sea as a merchant navy officer, watching how ships were operated and how much of maritime work is dull, repeated and dangerous — the kind of task a machine should do. When he incorporated Sagar Defence Engineering in May 2015, the bet was that India would want autonomous maritime systems it could own and control, rather than import, and that a home-grown autonomy stack would be the hard, defensible part.
He did not build it alone. The team he assembled paired sea-going operational knowledge with deep technical talent: co-founders Mridul Babbar, now the chief financial officer, and Lakshay Dang, the chief technology officer, had previously worked with NASA, according to CARE Ratings. That combination — someone who understood the customer’s problem from the bridge of a ship, and engineers who could write autonomy software — is the origin of the patents and intellectual property that now sit at the centre of the business.
The struggle years
For most of its first decade, Sagar Defence was a tiny company living on lumpy, hard-won government work. The scale is easy to miss now: total operating income was just ₹7.85 crore in FY22. Two documented strains from those years stand out.
First, thin and fluctuating profitability. As late as FY24, the PBILDT (operating) margin was only 13.85% and the PAT margin 8.92%, on revenue of ₹38.82 crore — respectable for a hardware start-up, but a long way from a durable business, and CARE explicitly describes a “period of relatively lower and fluctuating margins in earlier years.”
Second, a punishing cash cycle. Because the buyers are government and defence entities that pay against milestones, inspections and clearances, money came in slowly. The operating cycle stretched beyond 12 months at one point and only compressed to about four months across FY22–FY25. Leverage reflected the strain: overall gearing was 1.50x as on 31 March 2022. A young company selling capital-heavy hardware to slow-paying customers is the classic way defence start-ups die, and Sagar Defence spent years inside that trap before it scaled out of it.
The turning point
The inflection came in FY25, and it shows up in every line of the audited accounts. Set the two years side by side:
- Revenue: ₹38.82 crore (FY24) to ₹100.97 crore (FY25) — a 160.1% jump.
- PAT: ₹3.46 crore (FY24) to ₹33.34 crore (FY25) — nearly ten times.
- Operating margin (PBILDT): 13.85% to 45.53%; PAT margin 8.92% to 33.01%.
- Overall gearing: 0.55x to 0.05x, after a Series A compulsorily convertible preference share (CCPS) round in December 2024.
Two things converted at once. Years of R&D on the core product lines had already been paid for, so as defence contracts finally executed at volume, operating leverage did the rest — high gross margins fell through to the bottom line. And the order book turned the corner from a trickle into a backlog: ₹2,730 crore as on 30 September 2025 (about $284 million), which CARE flags as roughly 27 times FY25 revenue, scheduled to execute over three years. A company that had booked ₹7.85 crore in a year now had years of visible work in hand.
The money behind it
Sagar Defence has raised capital in steps, from strategic and government-linked backers rather than pure venture funds — fitting for a defence supplier. The reported shape:
- ONGC start-up support (January 2023): an initial ₹4.54 crore, with a further ₹4 crore flagged for upcoming projects, from the oil major’s start-up programme (PSU Connect).
- Series A CCPS (December 2024): confirmed by CARE Ratings as the round that lifted net worth and cut gearing to 0.05x; aggregators peg it around $25 million.
- Latest round (30 March 2026): reported at $18.1 million, with Skegen named as lead investor (Tracxn, aggregator).
- Named backers over time: Maharashtra Defence and Aerospace Venture Fund, ONGC’s start-up arm and Skegen (Venture Intelligence).
Deal trackers put cumulative funding at roughly $48–49 million raised between 2019 and March 2026, and one aggregator (PitchBook) estimates a post-round valuation near $373 million as of April 2026. Both the total and the valuation come from third-party databases rather than company filings, so treat them as reported, not confirmed. The clearest signal of what investors think the company is worth may instead be the reported plan, tracked by Venture Intelligence, to explore an IPO of ₹2,000–3,000 crore with a mix of fresh issue and offer for sale.
How it makes money
The business model is defence contracting with a software-margin twist. Money comes in through fixed-price contracts won largely via the government’s iDEX and SPRINT innovation routes and direct Ministry of Defence procurement; revenue is recognised as milestones are cleared. The economics work like this:
- Where the margin sits: in the proprietary autonomy stack. CARE notes the patented technologies command “high gross margins,” especially now that the heavy R&D on current product lines is already sunk — so incremental orders are highly profitable (FY25 PBILDT margin 45.53%).
- The moat: patents, IP and the difficulty of clearing defence regulation act as entry barriers in a “niche defence tech segment” with limited competition, per CARE.
- The cost the buyer accepts: contracts are mostly fixed-price, so Sagar Defence carries raw-material price risk — but its margin buffer and cost controls have absorbed that so far.
- The part people get wrong: the money is not in the boats. It is in autonomy that is validated in operational defence settings, which is why a hardware company posts margins that look like a software firm’s.
The numbers
Figures in ₹ crore. FY24 and FY25 are audited (CARE Ratings, October 2025); FY22 revenue is from the same report; the FY26 revenue figure is reported by MCA-data aggregator Tracxn and is not yet independently confirmed in an audited filing.
| Financial year | Total operating income (₹ crore) | PAT (₹ crore) |
| FY22 | 7.85 | Not disclosed here |
| FY24 (audited) | 38.82 | 3.46 |
| FY25 (audited) | 100.97 | 33.34 |
| FY26 (reported) | 254.59 | Not verified |
Other verified balance-sheet markers as on 31 March 2025: free cash and bank balance of ₹167.77 crore, current ratio 4.45x, interest coverage 10.16x, and overall gearing of 0.05x — a near debt-free structure. On the strength of these, CARE Ratings assigned CARE BBB (Stable) to ₹40 crore of long-term bank facilities and CARE A3+ to ₹115 crore of short-term facilities on 17 October 2025.
Where the money comes from
The revenue mix is concentrated by design, and that is both the strength and the surprise:
- Customer base: predominantly government and defence entities — the Ministry of Defence, Indian Navy, Indian Coast Guard and DRDO. Counterparty risk is low (the government pays), but timing risk is high.
- Geography: revenues are entirely denominated in INR, per CARE — this is a domestic-demand story riding “Make in India” and “Atmanirbhar Bharat” defence-indigenisation policy.
- Backlog concentration: the ₹2,730 crore order book (30 September 2025) is the real engine; it is roughly 27x FY25 revenue and is meant to execute over three years, which is what underwrites the growth thesis.
- The surprise: although the company markets futuristic-sounding “boat swarms,” some inputs are sourced abroad. CARE flags forex risk because Sagar Defence depends on a few components not made at scale in India — so a rupee-only revenue base sits on a partly dollar-priced cost base.
Proof points behind the backlog are concrete. In January 2023 the company signed the 50th iDEX SPRINT contract, for autonomous weaponised boat swarms, with the Navy expected to order 12 systems. In November 2024 it completed the roughly 1,500 km “Sagarmala Parikrama” — an autonomous surface-vessel voyage from Mumbai to Thoothukudi with Navy innovation-cell support. And on 7 May 2026, an indigenous ship-launched maritime spotter drone was deployed from the carrier INS Vikrant; reporting on that system cited a 20 km range, up to 120 minutes of endurance and a 60-unit Navy order.
The risks
The rating agency is unusually specific about what could go wrong, and its list matters because the company itself lives with these mechanisms daily:
- Working-capital intensity. Payments are milestone-based and gated by inspections and clearances, so cash is tied up in receivables. The operating cycle has improved to about four months, but CARE expects working-capital needs to stay high as the company scales — a fast-growing order book can strain liquidity if collections slip.
- Technology obsolescence and regulatory dependence. Autonomous and unmanned systems advance quickly; without continuous product investment, today’s edge erodes. And because almost all revenue comes from government defence procurement, any shift in policy, budget cuts, or approval delays could hit order inflows and execution timelines directly.
- Foreign-exchange exposure with no natural hedge. Revenues are entirely in rupees, but a few critical components are imported. With no formal hedging mechanism cited, adverse currency moves feed straight into the cost base and margins.
To these, add a structural one visible in the numbers: customer and backlog concentration. A business where a single order book is 27x annual revenue and the buyer is essentially one entity — the Indian government — is exposed to the timing and priorities of that one customer.
The takeaway
Sagar Defence Engineering is a lesson in patience compounding. For almost a decade it looked like a marginal hardware start-up — ₹7.85 crore of revenue in FY22, thin margins, a cash cycle over a year long. The transferable point is that in deep-tech, the years of unglamorous R&D and slow government pilots are not wasted time; they are the fixed cost that, once paid, lets a later surge in orders drop almost straight to profit. When the contracts finally landed at scale in FY25, the company did not have to reinvent its product — it just had to build what it had already engineered. The moat was never the boat. It was the decade spent making the boat drive itself, and owning the patents that prove it.
Frequently asked questions
What does Sagar Defence Engineering make?
It designs and builds uncrewed and autonomous systems for the maritime, aerial, underwater and land domains — unmanned surface vehicles, autonomous weaponised boat swarms, underwater and aerial drones, and heavy-lift aerial platforms — powered by its patented Genisys “Boat in a Box” autonomy stack, sold mainly to India’s defence buyers.
Who founded the company and when?
It was incorporated in May 2015. Captain Nikunj Parashar, a former merchant navy officer, is Managing Director; co-founders Mridul Babbar (CFO) and Lakshay Dang (CTO) previously worked with NASA, according to CARE Ratings.
How much money does it make?
Audited total operating income was ₹100.97 crore in FY25 with a profit after tax of ₹33.34 crore (a 33.0% margin), up from ₹38.82 crore of revenue and ₹3.46 crore of profit in FY24. A higher FY26 revenue figure of ₹254.59 crore is reported by aggregators but not yet independently confirmed in an audited filing.
How big is its order book?
CARE Ratings reported an order book of ₹2,730 crore (about $284 million) as on 30 September 2025 — roughly 27 times FY25 revenue — scheduled for execution over about three years.
Is Sagar Defence Engineering going public?
It is private. Venture Intelligence has reported that the company is exploring an IPO of ₹2,000–3,000 crore comprising a fresh issue and an offer for sale; nothing has been confirmed as listed at the time of writing.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- CARE Ratings (CareEdge) — rating press release on Sagar Defence Engineering Private Limited, October 2025 (audited FY24 and FY25 financials, order book, ratings, founders, risks).
- Venture Intelligence — report on Sagar Defence exploring a ₹2,000–3,000 crore IPO (DAM Capital as adviser; FY25 operating income and PAT), 2026.
- PSU Connect — ONGC’s initial ₹4.54 crore investment in Sagar Defence Engineering, January 2023.
- Aviation & Defence Universe — Sagar Defence signs 50th iDEX-DIO SPRINT contract for autonomous weaponised boat swarms, January 2023.
- India Strategic — Sagar Defence completes the ~1,500 km “Sagarmala Parikrama” autonomous voyage with Indian Navy support, November 2024.
- Indian Defense News — India’s first indigenous ship-launched maritime spotter drone deployed from INS Vikrant, May 2026.
- Tracxn / PitchBook — funding rounds, March 2026 round, cumulative funding and reported valuation (aggregator data), 2026.
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