Zulu Defence builds tactical drones in Bengaluru, and even the Dutch special forces have placed an order
The defence startup sells only to armed forces. Its systems have been through trials with the Indian Army and the Navy's marine commandos.
Modern warfare has shifted toward small unmanned systems. They are cheap to build, hard to see and difficult to stop, and recent conflicts have shown how much damage they can do to far more expensive equipment.
India has been buying such systems from abroad while trying to build its own. , a Bengaluru-based startup, is one of the companies working on the domestic side of that gap.
The company was founded in October 2023 by Rajagopal Sethauram and Nagendran Kandasamy, who is its chief executive. Kandasamy had built two companies before this one, including a drone logistics venture he exited in 2031 after concluding that civil drone operations in India were held back by regulatory uncertainty.
He returned to drones on the defence side instead. Zulu sells to armed forces and to nobody else, which is unusual even among Indian defence startups, most of which keep a commercial line running alongside.
The choice narrows the customer base to a handful of buyers with long procurement cycles. It also means the company builds according to military requirements from the start, rather than adapting a commercial product later.
Built for contested airspace
Zulu builds tactical unmanned systems for military use. Its main platforms are HOVERBEE, a hovering system for reconnaissance and strike missions, and DRAP, short for Directed Reconnaissance and Attack Platform.
The company describes DRAP as India's first indigenous hovering loitering munition platform that combines reconnaissance with precision strike. That is the company's own characterisation of the product.
The systems are designed to keep working in electronically contested conditions, where signals are jammed, and satellite navigation is unreliable. That requirement has become central to modern battlefield equipment, and it is the main reason armed forces are cautious about imported systems they cannot fully verify.
In May 2026, the company showed a multi-barrel launcher that can send up several of its systems at once, either together or in sequence. It is designed to work with the platforms Zulu already sells.
The pattern across the product line is portability. These are systems a small unit carries and operates on its own, rather than equipment that needs a fixed installation and a support crew behind it.
From Indian trials to a European order
Zulu's systems have been through field evaluations with units of the Indian Army and the Navy's Marine Commando Force. The company says they performed well in those trials and were recommended for service acceptance.
The larger milestone came from abroad. Netherlands Special Forces placed a procurement order for the DRAP platform, an export result that few Indian defence startups of this age have matched. The company has also begun exporting to other markets in Europe and West Asia.
On revenue, Zulu was recording roughly Rs 9.3 crore annually as of March 2025, which was then substantial for the company. It has raised close to $987,000 across two early rounds, backed by Finvolve, India Accelerator and Indusbridge Ventures.
The company has expanded its Bengaluru manufacturing capacity as it moves several systems from prototypes into production. For a young defence manufacturer, that shift is the difficult part, and it is where the current work sits.
Indian defence procurement has opened considerably to private startups in recent years, through trials, evaluation programmes and a policy push toward equipment made in the country. Zulu is one of the companies testing how far that opening goes.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)