Skylark Drones spent its first four years unable to legally fly a drone for hire in its own country. India’s aviation regulator effectively grounded civilian drone operations from 2014, and the rules that would let a company like this sell drone services commercially did not arrive until the government’s Digital Sky policy took effect on 1 December 2018.
That decade-long wait reads oddly against what came after. The Bengaluru company grew revenue 446.6% year-on-year, from ₹5.0 crore in FY24 to ₹27.3 crore (~$2.8 million) in FY25, as per data compiled by Inc42 Datalabs from its regulatory filings — and it still closed the year with a net loss. Ten years after two mechanical engineers flew prototypes over a Bengaluru park to drum up interest, Skylark Drones’ hardest problem was never making drones fly. It was making the business fly.
Quick facts
| Company | Skylark Drones Private Limited |
| Founded | 2014 (incorporated as a private limited company on 22 July 2015, per Ministry of Corporate Affairs records) |
| Founder(s) | Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy and Mrinal Pai |
| Businesses | Drone-as-a-service (survey, inspection, volumetric measurement) and Spectra, a subscription data-analytics platform, for mining, solar, infrastructure and agriculture clients |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹27.3 crore (~$2.8 million) in FY25 (Inc42 Datalabs) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹1.1 crore in FY25 (Inc42 Datalabs) |
| Listed | Private (unlisted); no IPO announced as of September 2026 |
| Market value / last valuation | Not publicly disclosed; total funding reported at roughly $4.6 million across four rounds (Tracxn) |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Co-founder and CEO Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy; investors include InfoEdge Ventures, IAN Fund, Soonicorn Ventures and Vruddhi Ventures |
What they do
Skylark Drones is a business-to-business drone company: it does not sell drones to hobbyists, and it is not a defence or delivery player. It sells recurring access to aerial data and the software to make sense of it, mostly to large Indian industrial companies. Its two customer motions are drone-as-a-service — its own licensed pilots and fleets fly surveys, inspections and volumetric measurements at a client’s mine, solar farm, road corridor or transmission line — and Spectra, a cloud platform that turns the resulting imagery into orthomosaic maps, 3D point clouds, defect flags and dashboards that a plant manager can act on without a photogrammetry background. Clients named on the company’s own website span heavy industry and infrastructure, including Tata Steel, UltraTech Cement, Hindalco, Balco, Hindustan Zinc, SAIL, L&T, Reliance Infrastructure, renewable-energy firms Ayana and CleanMax, Bosch and Alstom (company-stated, skylarkdrones.com, accessed September 2026).
The origin
The company traces back to Team Vyoma, a student group at R V College of Engineering in Bengaluru that built drones for the international SAE Aerodesign competition. Two of its members — mechanical engineers Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy and Mrinal Pai, who had also interned at the Indian Institute of Science — kept flying after graduation and started Skylark Drones in 2014, before formally incorporating Skylark Drones Private Limited on 22 July 2015 (Tofler, citing Ministry of Corporate Affairs records). There was no enterprise pipeline waiting for them. In the earliest days the pair flew branded prototypes over Bengaluru’s Lal Bagh botanical garden, on the bet that early-morning joggers included the industrial decision-makers who might buy what they were building, handing out brochures and wearing company T-shirts to get noticed (CrazyEngineers interview with co-founder Mrinal Pai; Prodwrks, 2026). Co-founder Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy has since described the founding insight bluntly: hardware alone would not be a defensible business because “hardware is getting commoditized,” so the real opportunity was to build, in his words, “the best enterprise software company out of India for drone tech” — using field services as the way to learn each industrial sector before productising what they learned (Prodwrks interview with Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy, 2026).
The struggle years
Two setbacks defined Skylark’s first half-decade, and neither is softened by hindsight.
The first was regulatory, and it was close to existential for a company built entirely around flying: India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation banned civilian drone operations in 2014, and no clear legal path to commercial drone services existed until the government’s Digital Sky policy and its “no permission, no take-off” (NPNT) framework came into force on 1 December 2018 — a gap of roughly four years in which the core activity the founders had built a company around could not lawfully be sold as a service at scale. Skylark’s founders have said they funded early research and development through college and school workshops and reinvested the earnings, because there was, in effect, no commercial drone-services market to sell into yet (Prodwrks interview, 2026; regulatory background per Forbes India, 2021).
The second setback was strategic, and self-inflicted in a more useful way. Skylark started out trying to be a full-stack company, building and selling its own hardware alongside services. Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy later admitted the team could “never be the best in hardware, given the ecosystem,” and walked the company back from manufacturing to focus on services and software, on the principle that “we should either be a winner in a space or not be in the space at all” (Prodwrks interview, 2026). Choosing to exit hardware after building a company around building hardware is its own kind of near-death: it meant writing off sunk engineering effort and re-explaining the business to everyone who had backed the original pitch.
The turning point
The moment the wait paid off has a date. With rules still in draft, Skylark had already begun deploying drones at a Tata Steel mine in December 2018 to test compliance-grade surveying (Business Standard, December 2018). Then, on 21 June 2019, Skylark Drones launched Patang, which it says was India’s first drone compliant with the DGCA’s NPNT protocol under the new Digital Sky framework — reported at the time as one of only two Bengaluru start-ups, alongside Throttle Aerospace Systems, to reach that compliance bar (Business Standard, June 2019; MediaNama, June 2019).
The before-and-after is stark. Before compliance, the company’s only outside capital across roughly four years was a single, largely undisclosed seed round of about $755,000 led by Vruddhi Ventures in November 2015, and revenue came mostly from workshops and one-off pilot projects. After it, Skylark became a vendor that large industrial companies could put on an approved-supplier list without a regulatory question mark hanging over it. It went on to raise $3 million (about ₹22 crore at the time) in a Pre-Series A round in July 2021, days before the government’s broader Drone Rules 2021 further cut drone-related paperwork from 25 forms to five (PIB backgrounder on the Drone Rules 2021, January 2022), and scaled revenue from ₹4.2 crore in FY23 to ₹27.3 crore by FY25 (Inc42 Datalabs).
The money behind it
Skylark has raised in small, spaced-out rounds rather than one large marquee round, which fits a company that spent a decade building enterprise trust sector by sector rather than chasing scale first.
- Seed, November 2015: about $755,000 (exact figure undisclosed), led by Vruddhi Ventures — the capital that carried the company through the pre-2018 regulatory freeze (Clay funding dossier, citing Crunchbase).
- Pre-Series A, July 2021: $3 million (about ₹22 crore), co-led by InfoEdge Ventures and IAN Fund, with AdvantEdge Founders, Fowler Westrup, Redstart Labs, IKP and Vimson Group participating — earmarked for product and international expansion just as Indian drone rules loosened (Business Standard, July 2021; SiliconIndia, July 2021; Skylark Drones company blog, July 2021).
- Seed extension, April 2022: undisclosed amount from Amaara Projects (Clay funding dossier, citing Crunchbase and Tracxn).
- Seed round, August 2023: about $1.19 million, with Soonicorn Ventures and LetsVenture leading and angel investors including Karanpal Singh and Forge Innovation & Ventures participating (Crunchbase; Clay funding dossier).
- Total raised: reported at roughly $4.6 million (about ₹40-44 crore) across four rounds and dozens of investors, per Tracxn — a modest sum for an 11-year-old company, reflecting how long it ran on services revenue rather than venture capital.
- Valuation: not publicly disclosed as of September 2026 (Tracxn; PitchBook).
No round has come with a disclosed valuation, and there is no announced Series A or growth round beyond the 2021 Pre-Series A — unusual for an eleven-year-old company, and consistent with founders who have said they prioritised proving unit economics sector by sector over raising to a headline number.
How it makes money
Skylark earns in two layers that are meant to reinforce each other. The first is services: clients pay per project or per site for drone surveys — pilots, licensed aircraft, flight planning and raw data capture — priced against the cost and risk it replaces, such as a manual land survey or an inspection crew working a mine face. The second, and the one the founders describe as the real business, is software: once a client has run enough service engagements, Skylark pitches Spectra as an annual subscription licence sitting on top of a workflow the client already trusts, priced, in Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy’s words, closer to “a percentage” of the value the client’s own team estimates it saves, rather than a flat data-processing fee (Prodwrks interview, 2026).
- Drone-as-a-service (DaaS): project- and site-based survey, inspection and volumetric-measurement contracts, delivered with Skylark’s own licensed pilots and fleet.
- Spectra platform subscriptions: recurring licences for sector-specific dashboards covering mining, solar, utilities, transport and agriculture, built on data Skylark or a client’s own pilots capture.
- Ancillary tools: Drone Mission Ops, a fleet and flight-operations management tool, and Watchtower, an airspace-mapping tool for compliance, sold alongside the core platform (company-stated, skylarkdrones.com).
The part outsiders get wrong, in the founders’ own framing, is treating this as a drone-hardware business at all: Skylark does not manufacture drones for sale, and its founders have said they exited that ambition years ago because hardware margins were being commoditised by larger, mostly import-driven suppliers (Prodwrks interview, 2026). The margin, such as it is, sits in the data-processing and subscription layer rather than in flying time — which is also consistent with FY25’s revenue scaling far faster than its losses widened.
The numbers
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Net profit / (loss) (₹ crore) |
| FY23 | 4.2 | Not disclosed |
| FY24 | 5.0 | (5.1) |
| FY25 | 27.3 | (1.1) |
(Inc42 Datalabs, compiled from company filings, 2026.)
Two things stand out. Revenue grew about 19.4% from FY23 to FY24 and then jumped 446.6% in FY25 — a scale-up Inc42 Datalabs attributes to the company’s regulatory filings for the year. And the loss, while still present, narrowed sharply in relative terms: FY24’s ₹5.1 crore loss was larger than that year’s entire revenue, while FY25’s ₹1.1 crore loss came in at roughly 4.1% of a revenue base more than five times bigger. That is the shape of a services business starting to get operating leverage from its software layer — not yet a profitable one.
Where the money comes from
Skylark does not publish a formal revenue-by-segment breakdown, so the following draws on the industries and named clients it discloses rather than exact percentages.
- Mining and metals: Tata Steel, UltraTech Cement, Hindalco, Balco, Hindustan Zinc and SAIL are named clients for volumetric measurement, haul-road optimisation and compliance-linked surveys (company-stated, skylarkdrones.com).
- Solar and renewable energy: Ayana, CleanMax, Sprng Energy, ReNew Power and Sterling & Wilson use the platform for construction-progress tracking and thermographic panel inspection (company-stated, skylarkdrones.com).
- Infrastructure and utilities: L&T, Reliance Infrastructure and Shapoorji Pallonji are named for road, rail and transmission-line monitoring (company-stated, skylarkdrones.com).
- Other industrial accounts: Bosch and Alstom also appear on the client list, suggesting some diversification beyond mining and energy (company-stated, skylarkdrones.com).
The real surprise is not geography — the company remains overwhelmingly India-focused despite describing its tools as “geography-agnostic” — but concentration. The founders’ own account of building the business, particularly a UltraTech Cement relationship cultivated over roughly six years before it converted into a subscription, points to a strategy of going deep on a small number of large accounts rather than wide across many small ones (Prodwrks interview, 2026). It is also worth flagging an inconsistency in the company’s own materials: its homepage states “20,000+” autonomous flights completed while its About page states “1,00,000+” — this piece notes the discrepancy rather than resolving it, since both are self-reported (skylarkdrones.com, accessed September 2026).
The risks
- Customer concentration: the founders’ own account of building the business — landing a handful of large industrial accounts such as Tata Steel and UltraTech Cement and going deep on each over years — implies revenue is concentrated in a small number of relationships; losing even one anchor account could disproportionately hurt a company of Skylark’s size (mechanism per Prodwrks interview with co-founder Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy, 2026).
- Regulatory dependence: Skylark’s core business only became legally viable at scale after the Digital Sky/NPNT framework of December 2018, and its funding and growth accelerated further after the Drone Rules 2021 liberalisation; any future tightening of airspace clearances, pilot-licensing (RPTO) norms or drone-component import rules would raise compliance costs or restrict flight approvals for a business built on flying at client sites (PIB Drone Rules 2021 backgrounder, January 2022).
- Persistent losses despite scale: the company posted a net loss in both FY24 (₹5.1 crore) and FY25 (₹1.1 crore) even as revenue grew 446.6% year-on-year, meaning the software-subscription layer that is supposed to carry margin has not yet made an eleven-year-old company profitable (Inc42 Datalabs, 2026).
The takeaway
Skylark Drones’ clearest lesson is not really about drones. It is about what a regulator’s silence costs a startup, and how a services business can be used deliberately as a paid research project rather than treated as a permanent ceiling. The founders spent years being told, in effect, that they could not legally sell what they had built, and used the delay to learn mining, solar and infrastructure workflows sector by sector through fee-for-service work before trying to package that knowledge into recurring software. That sequencing — service first, to earn the right to charge for a subscription later — took over a decade to fully show up in the numbers. It is a slower path than most venture-funded playbooks assume, and Skylark’s total disclosed funding of roughly $4.6 million over eleven years, modest by Indian deep-tech standards, reflects exactly how slow it was.
Frequently asked questions
What does Skylark Drones actually sell?
It sells drone survey and inspection services plus Spectra, a subscription software platform that turns aerial imagery into maps, 3D models and dashboards for industrial clients in mining, solar, infrastructure and agriculture (company-stated, skylarkdrones.com).
Who founded Skylark Drones, and when?
Mechanical engineers Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy and Mrinal Pai, former teammates on R V College of Engineering’s Team Vyoma, started the company in 2014; it was incorporated as Skylark Drones Private Limited on 22 July 2015 (Tofler, citing Ministry of Corporate Affairs records).
How much money has Skylark Drones raised, and at what valuation?
Reported total funding is about $4.6 million across a 2015 seed round, a $3 million Pre-Series A in July 2021, and two further seed rounds in 2022 and 2023. No valuation has been publicly disclosed as of September 2026 (Tracxn; PitchBook).
Is Skylark Drones profitable?
No. It posted a net loss of ₹5.1 crore in FY24 and ₹1.1 crore in FY25, even as revenue grew 446.6% year-on-year to ₹27.3 crore in FY25 (Inc42 Datalabs).
Is Skylark Drones listed on a stock exchange?
No. It remains a private limited company with no announced IPO plans as of September 2026 (Tofler; Tracxn).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Inc42 Datalabs, “Skylark Drones — Financials,” accessed September 2026
- Tracxn, “Skylark Drones — Company Profile and Funding,” accessed September 2026
- PitchBook, “Skylark Drones — Company Profile,” accessed September 2026
- Clay, “How Much Did Skylark Drones Raise? Funding & Key Investors,” accessed September 2026 (citing Crunchbase)
- Tofler, “Skylark Drones Private Limited — Company Details,” accessed September 2026
- Business Standard, “India’s Skylark Drones raises $3 mn to fuel international expansion,” July 2021
- SiliconIndia, “Skylark Drones raises $3 million in Pre-Series A funding,” July 2021
- Skylark Drones company blog, “Drone Platform Company Skylark Drones Raises $3 Million In Pre-Series A Funding Round,” July 2021
- Business Standard, “In a first, Bengaluru-based Skylark gets DGCA green light to fly drones,” June 2019
- MediaNama, “Two Bengaluru start-ups first to get DGCA certification for drones: report,” June 2019
- Business Standard, “With draft rules in place, Skylark Drones to deploy UAVs at Tata Steel mine,” December 2018
- Prodwrks, “Skylark Drones’ Journey from Public Demos in Lal Bagh to Unlocking Drone Data Intelligence for Tata & UltraTech,” 2026
- CrazyEngineers, “Interview with Mrinal Pai, Co-Founder — Skylark Drones,” accessed September 2026
- PIB (Press Information Bureau), “The Drone Rules, 2021 — Backgrounder,” January 2022
- skylarkdrones.com, “About” page and homepage, accessed September 2026 (company-stated figures)
- Crunchbase, “Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy — Co-Founder and CEO,” accessed September 2026
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