ZeroDrag is building the made-in-India electronics every drone needs
The startup supplies Indian-made flight electronics to drone manufacturers, cutting their reliance on Chinese parts, backed by Rs 6.5 crore from Transition VC.
India has one of the world's largest drone markets, with a growing base of drone companies and licensed pilots. Almost all of those drones run on electronics made in China.
The hardware- autopilots and flight controllers that act as a drone's brain, and the modules that track its location and keep it stable- is overwhelmingly imported. was founded to build them in India instead.
That dependence is a strategic problem as much as a commercial one. If tensions rise with the country supplying those parts, a shortage or quality problem could ground an entire fleet, including military drones.
The company was started in 2022 by Shantanu Bhede, its CEO, and Amit Nimje, its COO. They put it plainly. “We're not building drones. We're building what every drone needs,” Bhede says. “If the Indian UAV industry is going to scale, it needs an avionics layer it can actually rely on, and that layer has to come from India.”
ZeroDrag started out of the research park at IIT Delhi, where it was incubated, and now runs its operations from Nagpur.
The layer under every drone
Avionics is the electronics that make a flying machine work. In a drone, that means the flight controller and autopilot, the motor controllers, the GNSS modules that handle location and navigation, the telemetry that sends and receives data mid-flight, and the hardware that connects a payload.
ZeroDrag builds this whole layer and sells it to drone makers rather than building drones itself. Its parts are modular and work across different platforms, from small first-person-view craft to industrial UAVs, and run with widely used flight-control software.
The startup can supply to many manufacturers at once without competing with them. ZeroDrag positions itself as a domestic, reliable alternative to imported electronics, backed by local support.
Its customers range from large enterprise UAV firms to the growing community of first-person-view builders, who need dependable, affordable electronics that are not always easy to source in small volumes.
Selling to OEMs, watching the border
ZeroDrag sells to drone makers across defence, agriculture, logistics and industrial uses, and says it is seeing rising interest from the United States and Europe, where manufacturers are also looking for non-Chinese components.
It raised Rs 6.5 crore in a seed round led by Transition VC, following a Rs 1.2 crore pre-seed in 2023 from Enrission India Capital and angel investors. The money goes toward manufacturing, testing and quality infrastructure, and steadying its supply chain.
Its lead investor frames avionics and flight control as the intelligence layer of every drone, and one that is today almost entirely Chinese, which casts an Indian supplier as a piece of national infrastructure as much as a product company.
The Rs 6.5 crore round follows the 2023 pre-seed and signals a shift from proving the technology works to getting it into customers' hands at scale.
Over the next couple of years, the company plans to widen its range into enterprise-grade UAV hardware, including systems for heavy-lift drones and future eVTOL platforms. The reasoning is simple: as India's drone industry grows, it will not want its most critical electronics coming from across a contested border.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)