KshatraLabs is building a drone that catches other drones
The Bengaluru-based company develops autonomous aerial interceptors designed to detect, track and bring down hostile unmanned aircraft, including swarms.
Counter-drone defence has settled into two approaches. Soft kill means interfering with the signals a drone depends on, jamming its navigation or its link to an operator. Hard kill means physically stopping it. Soft kill is cheaper and reversible, and it fails against anything flying a pre-programmed route without needing a signal at all.
That failure mode is why interceptors have gained ground. A drone sent to catch another drone is expensive compared to a jammer and cheap compared to a missile, and it works whether or not the target is listening to anyone.
was founded in Bengaluru in October 2025 to build such products. It describes itself as a defence robotics company working on autonomous counter-drone systems, with a stated ambition to develop and field autonomous robots across air, land, sea and space.
Five seconds to launch
The product is called HAWK. The company describes it as an autonomous aerial interceptor that detects, tracks and neutralises hostile unmanned aircraft at speeds upwards of 89.5 metres per second, around 300 km/h, with launch readiness in under five seconds.
Those two figures point at the same problem. A drone approaching a site gives very little warning, so an interceptor that takes a minute to prepare has already lost, and one that cannot outrun its target never reaches it.
The design is described as software-first. External sensors such as radar hand off to electro-optical and infrared sensors carried onboard, which take over for the final approach, and the company says this runs on a proprietary autonomy stack it calls APEX.
It is also working on swarm-capable interceptors, meaning several working together against a mass attack, and on a command and control layer intended to function where satellite navigation is unavailable. Both point at the same assumption: that the threat arrives in numbers and the defender cannot rely on its own signals working.
The company says it has completed hardware-in-the-loop testing at 90 metres per second, a method where real hardware runs against a simulated environment, and that it has taken feedback from the Indian Armed Forces on hard-kill systems.
A pre-seed round, and a long qualification road
In August 2026, Finvolve and India Accelerator announced a pre-seed investment in the company. The amount was not disclosed. The stated use is research and development, engineering hires, intellectual property, certifications, defence events and operations.
The specific goal attached to the money is a readiness level. The company aims to advance its interceptors to technology readiness level 6, which means a prototype demonstrated in a relevant environment rather than a laboratory, and towards field validation.
The market it is entering already contains Bharat Electronics, Zen Technologies and Paras Defence, all far larger and long established with the buyer. Defence procurement rewards incumbency, and a certified product from a known supplier is an easier decision than a faster one from a company nobody has bought from before.
KshatraLabs is only ten months old, employs fewer than ten people, and has no announced customer, order or certification. What it has going for it, however, are specifications, test results and a market moving in its direction.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)