MapmyIndia partners Drone Federation of India for 'Drone Innovation Challenge'

Home-grown navigation firm MapmyIndia has announced partnership with industry body Drone Federation of India to launch and fund 'Drone Innovation Challenge'.

The winners of the challenge will get up to Rs 1 crore or more worth of joint go-to-market support, business opportunities and funding support opportunities.

Besides this, the winner will get free access to MapmyIndia navigation solution for drones of up to Rs 4 lakh, which include APIs for advanced and interactive 2D, 3D, 4D and HD digital mapping, GIS, geospatial analytics, real-time drone identification, flight operations automation, etc., the company said in a statement.

"In the past few years, we have funded and partnered with various drone startups and ecosystem players. We will help the winners of the Drone Innovation Challenge 1.0 and further scale up the indigenous ecosystem with joint go-to-market business and funding opportunities," MapmyIndia CEO and executive director Rohan Verma said.

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He said the government introduced path-breaking regulatory reforms in the geospatial industry in February 2021, which liberalised, unshackled, and unleashed the potential of the indigenous geospatial industry.

"India's drone market will grow rapidly to a size of worth $1.8 billion by 2026, and we are focused on enabling, the best, most cutting edge drone solutions that positively benefit the Indian industry, economy and society and ensure our country's and citizens' safety, security and privacy," Verma said.

Drone Federation of India director Smit Shah said India is projected to become one of the largest markets for drones.

"While we focus on manufacturing drones in India. It is also crucial that we leverage India's existing software development expertise to develop an indigenous suite of software solutions to create significant value addition for the drone ecosystem. We aim to find, support and promote such indigenous solutions as a part of this challenge," Shah said.