DG Propulsion builds the small jet engines that India has always had to import

A jet engine is one of the few machines that resist reverse engineering. The design itself is public and well known. The difficulty is in the metallurgy, the tolerances and the manufacturing, all of which take decades to build up. A high-speed unmanned aircraft needs a compact turbojet, and Indian drone makers have had to buy those abroad, which means export licences, lead times and a supplier who knows exactly how dependent the customer is.

DG Propulsion was set up in 2019 to build them here. Prateek Dhawan had tested his first aero engine in 2018 while working at John Deere, having started on micro gas turbines as a college project, and met Chirag Gupta, a former Indian Navy officer, who came on as co-founder.

Twenty kilograms of thrust, then a hundred

The engines are named after their thrust. The DG J20, J40 and J60 produce 20, 40 and 60 kilogram-force respectively, all designed for unmanned aerial vehicles and defence applications, and all developed and tested in-house.

The real test has been endurance. The J40 completed a one-hour continuous run, which for a micro turbojet is the test that separates a working prototype from something that can fly a mission. In late 2024, the company test-ran a larger engine of about 100 kilograms, or one kilonewton, of thrust.

The harder problem is how much of the engine is actually made in India. Gupta has said the J40 currently runs at 30 to 35% Indian content and that the company aims to take that past 90%, supported by a Ministry of Defence grant. It shows how much of the jet engine supply chain India still lacks. The company has also built an engine control system it calls DG AEMS, and has said it is moving from turbojets towards turbofans, which are more efficient at the speeds transport and larger platforms fly at. In June 2026, it announced plans for a 10 kilonewton engine, an order of magnitude above anything it has tested.

An engine that flew

The clearest validation arrived this month. On 11 August 2026, Kawa UAV, the Lucknow company trading as HoverIt, flew its Divyastra Mk3 loitering munition for the first time, powered by a DG Propulsion turbojet. Both companies described it as the first Indian jet-powered loitering munition to fly on an Indian engine.

Flying in someone else's aircraft is a bigger deal than running on a test stand. It is also the first public instance of a DG Propulsion engine being integrated into a customer's platform and taken into the air.

The company exhibited at Aero India 2025 and signed an agreement there with a government defence agency, which it has not named. It has had support through iDEX, the Ministry of Defence innovation programme, alongside grant funding for indigenisation.

Its stated ambitions run wider than drones. The company describes work on jetpacks, jet speeders and air taxis alongside the engines, which is a broad front for a business that has not disclosed an external investor.

No funding round, revenue figure, order value or unit volume are publicly available, and the company has never announced an external investor.

(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)