SkyAI Technologies builds AI drone detection systems for airports and secured sites
The Kanpur-based company sells a computer vision system that detects, classifies and tracks unauthorised drones, alongside a contract software business in AI and data engineering.
Small drones are cheap, easy to fly and hard to see. That combination has made unauthorised flights over airports, industrial sites and public venues a practical problem for the people who run them, and one that conventional perimeter security was never designed to answer.
An operator needs to know that something is in the air, where it is heading and whether it warrants a response, usually within seconds. Doing that reliably means separating an aircraft from birds, kites and background clutter, at a distance.
was incorporated in Kanpur in December 2019 by Sarvagy Shukla and Shefali Bajpai. The company appears in the portfolio of the Startup Incubation and Innovation Centre (SIIC) at IIT Kanpur, which describes it as developing counter-drone systems.
The business runs on two tracks at once. One is contract software: SkyAI sells custom artificial intelligence and machine learning development, computer vision work, data strategy and engineering, web applications and ecommerce platforms. The company names retail, healthcare, manufacturing, distribution, education, and energy and utilities as the industries it serves. The other track is a set of its own products.
Detection, classification and the alert
The drone detection system is the most developed of those products. On its product page, SkyAI says the system uses computer vision and deep learning analytics to detect, classify and track unauthorised drones, and that it monitors drone movement and trajectory in real time.
The same page says the system assigns a threat category to a detected aircraft automatically and triggers alerts for unauthorised presence. SkyAI names airport airspace security, defence and military surveillance, critical infrastructure protection, industrial zone monitoring, public event security, and power plants and data centres as intended applications.
SIIC describes the approach in more detail in its portfolio entry, saying SkyAI builds object detection models that run on high-resolution visual and infrared cameras, and that the intended end-to-end system is meant to detect, localise and eventually neutralise target drones. SkyAI describes the underlying technology on its homepage as patented.
The rest of the catalogue is more conventional. The company lists an AI-assisted enterprise resource planning system, chatbots, face recognition with VIP alerts and a personalised recommendation engine, most of them presented as configurable deployments rather than finished products.
A services business alongside a product line
SkyAI has not announced an equity funding round. Its incubation at SIIC, IIT Kanpur is institutional support rather than investor capital. Company databases citing regulatory filings put revenue at about Rs 19.6 lakh for the year ended March 2024, and headcount at 19 as of May 2026.
The two tracks share a technical base. Computer vision models trained to read a client factory floor and models trained to pick an aircraft out of the sky use overlapping methods, and the company sells both from the same team.
What SkyAI has not published is a customer list for the drone system, or results from any field trial or evaluation. The client logos carried on its homepage belong to the services business, and the company has not linked any of them to the counter-drone work.
The company continues to post on enterprise AI adoption and generative AI through to December 2025, and has recruited Python developers through its founder’s LinkedIn page. Whether the counter-drone product moves from an incubator portfolio entry to a deployed system is the open question.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)