CrystalBall builds type-certified mapping drones for government surveys and mining operators
The Hyderabad-based company manufactures its own survey, surveillance and agricultural drones, and holds a type certificate that allows its mapping model to be bought through government procurement.
A drone that maps land for an official record has to clear a bar that an ordinary camera in the sky does not. The output becomes the basis of a document someone will rely on, so the aircraft, its sensors and the way it behaves when something goes wrong all have to be certified before the data counts for anything.
India set that bar with the Drone Rules of 2021, which created a type certification route for unmanned aircraft. A certificate is issued against a specific model rather than to a company, and it is what opens the door to government procurement.
, which operates as CBAI Technologies, was established in Hyderabad in September 2018. E Sandeep Reddy is the founder and CEO, and the company lists Sairaj B and Vidyasagar B as co-founders and product leads. It has been incubated at iTIC, the technology incubator at IIT Hyderabad.
The company began somewhere else entirely. Its incubator entry describes an on-demand drone first responder carrying vaccines, emergency medicine and blood to people who could not reach a hospital in time, a pitch shaped by the pandemic. The business that emerged instead sells mapping and survey aircraft.
The aircraft, and the certificate
CrystalBall manufactures its own aircraft rather than reselling someone else’s. Three models appear in Indian commercial drone directories: Model V for mapping and survey, Model T for surveillance, and Model M for agricultural spraying. The company pairs the hardware with its own processing, describing what it sells as end-to-end, from drone to insight.
Model V is the one that carries the certification. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation issued a type certificate for the model to CBAI Technologies under the Drone Rules 2021, valid until suspended or cancelled. Distributors list the aircraft at Rs 4.4 lakhs, with a 40-minute flight time, a 26-megapixel camera and dual recovery parachutes.
Those specifications come from reseller listings rather than from CrystalBall, whose website returns no readable product details. Sellers describe Model V as India’s first type-certified mapping drone, a claim the company has not published in that form itself.
CrystalBall has told its incubator that it holds approvals from the Airports Authority of India, the DGCA, the Ministry of Civil Aviation and the Ministry of Home Affairs to conduct beyond visual line of sight flights, and that it is an approved drone manufacturer in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
Mapping, mining, and government buyers
The company sells to the state through the Government e-Marketplace, where a rotorcraft surveillance model is listed under its name. Company databases citing filings put revenue at about Rs 4.9 crores for the year ended March 2025, and headcount at 22 as of March 2026.
The focus has narrowed since the early years. Tracxn records CrystalBall as currently building products for the mining and aggregates industries, a market where operators need site volumes and pit progress measured on a repeating schedule, and where survey-grade accuracy is the thing being bought.
No funding round has been announced publicly. Company databases record a single round from one institutional investor without naming an amount, and one of them classifies it as a grant rather than equity. Nothing about the size or the terms is on the record.
What is also not public is a customer list. CrystalBall has not named the mining operators or government departments buying its aircraft, and no contract value, deployment count or fleet size has been disclosed.
The company describes itself as a global business headquartered in California with offices in India. Its Indian entity is registered in Tarnaka, Hyderabad, and its certification, manufacturing approvals and public product listings all sit on the Indian side of that arrangement.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)