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Startup Deep Dive : Skylark Drones — revenue up 446% in FY25, still no profit

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Skylark Drones.

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.

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).

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.

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

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).

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