Autonomous systems, drones, defence AI, electronic warfare, cybersecurity, quantum security, aerospace defence, and strategic technologies developed in India.
DRDO has floated an expression of interest inviting private Indian firms to co-develop and eventually produce strategic missile and bomb systems, a marked shift beyond the defence public-sector undertakings that have historically held this work.
Manik Gupta
Author
IIT Guwahati alumnus Ankit Mishra's Bengaluru startup AlgoFET closed a Rs 15 crore pre-Series A round led by Piper Serica on 19 August 2026 to scale autonomous docking, high-power charging, battery management and fleet-monitoring hardware for India's drone operators — with 2,000 units already shipped and Rs 100 crore of orders on the books.
Manik Gupta
Author
The Rs 1,943-crore, 30-month lease of two MQ-9B Sea Guardian remotely piloted aircraft is a bridging deal to keep the Indian Navy's long-range maritime surveillance from going dark before its 31-aircraft fleet arrives from 2029. General Atomics signed the contract with the Ministry of Defence at Kartavya Bhawan-2 on 17 August 2026.
Manik Gupta
Author
Lucknow-based startup Kawa UAV (HoverIt) says its Divyastra Mk3 — powered by an indigenous DG Propulsion jet engine — completed a successful maiden flight on 11 August 2026, making it India's first fully home-built jet-powered loitering munition.
Manik Gupta
Author
India's Ministry of Defence has signed Rs 1,577 crore contracts with Tata Advanced Systems and NIBE for 840 long-range attack drones — jamming-resistant loitering munitions with a 100 km-plus range — to arm the Army's artillery regiments.
Manik Gupta
Author
Bengaluru defence-robotics startup KshatraLabs has raised undisclosed pre-seed funding from Finvolve and India Accelerator to advance HAWK, an autonomous hard-kill interceptor built to catch hostile drones travelling over 300 km/h within five seconds of launch.
Manik Gupta
Author
Chennai deep-tech startup Quarkitech has raised ₹2 crore in pre-seed funding, plus a ₹1.5 crore National Quantum Mission grant, to build software that compresses radar, LiDAR and hyperspectral sensor data by 10-100x at the source for UAVs and satellites.
Manik Gupta
Author
Bharat Electronics Limited has agreed to source twelve high-altitude kamikaze drones from EndureAir Systems, an IIT-Kanpur-incubated startup — an indigenous loitering munition built for precision strikes in the thin air of India's mountain frontiers.
Manik Gupta
Author
Bengaluru defence-tech startup Zoppler Systems has raised Rs 6.5 crore led by Finvolve and India Accelerator to scale its indigenous RF sensing hardware and an edge-AI autonomy platform that detects, locates and classifies radio-frequency activity across air, land, sea and eventually space.
Manik Gupta
Author
Bharat Electronics has signed an MoU with Esri India to jointly develop GIS, location-intelligence and GeoAI solutions for the defence sector, building on the indigenous 'Indo ArcGIS' platform and training BEL's own engineers in the process.
Manik Gupta
Author
Hyderabad-listed Apollo Micro Systems has won fresh defence electronics orders worth Rs 213.39 crore from DRDO, defence PSUs and private industry — nearly a full quarter of its current revenue run-rate.
Manik Gupta
Author
Hindustan Shipyard has delivered Nipun, the Indian Navy's second indigenous Nistar-class Diving Support Vessel, to Visakhapatnam — a nearly 10,000-tonne, ~75%-indigenous platform capable of saturation diving to 300 metres and serving as mother ship for the Navy's submarine-rescue submersible.
Manik Gupta
Author
India test-fired its nuclear-capable, canisterised Agni-4 ballistic missile from the Integrated Test Range off Odisha on 6 August 2026, with the Strategic Forces Command validating every parameter of the road-mobile, 4,000-km-range weapon.
Manik Gupta
Author
DRDO has floated a Technology Development Fund tender inviting Indian companies to build a swarm of 50 drones that fly in tight seven-by-seven formation under one operator, hold position to within five centimetres, and keep working through heavy jamming.
Manik Gupta
Author
India's Technology Development Board has sanctioned ₹151 crore to ideaForge to build YETI, a hybrid VTOL drone that can carry 200 kg across 200 km to resupply high-altitude Himalayan posts — one of the first big disbursements under the ₹1 lakh crore RDI scheme.
Manik Gupta
Author
The Indian Navy has commissioned INS Malvan, the second Mahe-class Anti-Submarine Warfare Shallow Water Craft built by Cochin Shipyard with over 80% indigenous content — a compact, near-shore submarine-hunter in a 16-ship programme central to India's coastal defence and Aatmanirbhar Bharat push.
Manik Gupta
Author
DRDO has signed two contracts to build the AEW&C Mk-II (Netra Mk II) surveillance aircraft — with AIESL converting six Airbus A321s into radar platforms and Adani Defence developing the mission systems — marking a major step for India's indigenous airborne early-warning capability.
Manik Gupta
Author
Hyderabad-based Raghu Vamsi Aerospace Group has raised $40 million in a Series B led by Norwest and Skegen Asset Management to expand precision manufacturing across India, the UK and the US and scale its mission systems, propulsion and autonomous-systems businesses.
Manik Gupta
Author
Hyderabad's Azad Engineering delivered India's first fully indigenous 350-kg thrust-class expendable turbojet engine, designed by DRDO's GTRE, on 22 July 2026 — a milestone for self-reliant propulsion that will power the country's medium-range anti-ship missile and drones.
Manik Gupta
Author
DRDO successfully conducted the maiden flight test of the Kusha long-range surface-to-air missile off Odisha on 23 July 2026, advancing India's plan for an indigenous, S-400-class air defence shield with interceptors reaching 350-400 km.
Manik Gupta
Author
Defence PSU AWEIL and IIT Kanpur have signed an MoU to jointly develop indigenous military drones and advanced ballistic systems, pairing the institute's research and prototyping with the manufacturer's mass-production capacity under the Atmanirbhar Bharat push.
Manik Gupta
Author
The Indian Army has invited domestic industry to develop a 1,000-km, AI-guided loitering munition that can strike in GPS-denied conditions. The long-range, one-way attack drone is to be built under the Make-II route, with each tactical set carrying 15 combat aerial vehicles.
Manik Gupta
Author
Apollyon Dynamics, founded by two BITS Pilani Hyderabad students, has raised ₹4 crore led by Naandi Ventures — with Skyroot, Dhruva Space and Agnikul joining — to develop Nightshade, a jet-powered strike drone that flies at 600–700 km/h.
Manik Gupta
Author
The Indian Navy commissioned INS Mahendragiri at Visakhapatnam on 11 July 2026, the final ship of the seven-vessel Project 17A stealth-frigate programme. Built by Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders with over 75 percent indigenous content, it carries BrahMos cruise missiles and marks the maturing of India's warship-building base.
Manik Gupta
Author
DRDO successfully flight-tested the Pinaka Long Range Guided Rocket at Chandipur on 8 July 2026, hitting a target at a user-defined 60 km range and firing from the existing Pinaka launcher without modification. The guided rocket turns India's saturation artillery system into a precision-strike weapon.
Manik Gupta
Author
India and Indonesia signed a defence package worth more than $600 million during PM Modi's Jakarta visit on 7 July 2026, sending the BrahMos cruise missile and the Astra air-to-air missile to the Indonesian armed forces. It makes Indonesia the second export customer for BrahMos and the first for the indigenous Astra.
Manik Gupta
Author
On 3 July 2026 the Defence Acquisition Council, chaired by Rajnath Singh, cleared about ₹52,000 crore of buys led by the indigenous 'Akash Tarang' anti-drone EW system and a ₹2,600-crore Bharat Dynamics order for 100 MP-ATGM launchers and 2,300 anti-tank missiles.
Manik Gupta
Author
IIT Delhi demonstrated an indigenous tactical aerostat developed under DRDO's SITEX programmes and built by FITT-incubated startup GB Texcoat Solution, cracking the imported-hull-fabric chokepoint behind high-altitude surveillance balloons designed to reach 20 km.
Manik Gupta
Author
HAL and DRDO's Research Centre Imarat signed a transfer-of-technology licence on 27 June 2026 letting HAL build indigenous electro-hydraulic servo valves for the LCA Tejas, closing a long-standing import gap in the fighter's flight-control hardware.
Manik Gupta
Author
On 29 June 2026, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh released DFP-2026, a reform of DRDO's financial powers meant to fund trials and pre-project research faster, streamline grants to startups and academia, and shrink the lab-to-frontline gap.
Manik Gupta
Author
On 25 June 2026, DRDO handed the Indian Air Force the Final Operational Clearance for its indigenous Netra airborne early-warning system — capping a programme sanctioned back in 2004 and clearing the way to nearly triple India's AEW&C fleet.
Manik Gupta
Author
PM Modi commissioned three home-built warships — stealth frigate INS Dunagiri, survey ship INS Sanshodhak and anti-submarine craft INS Agray — into the Indian Navy in a single day at Kolkata, a marker of how much of the combat stack GRSE now builds in India.
Manik Gupta
Author
India's Ministry of Defence has signed a ₹425 crore contract with Bharat Forge for 12 sets of indigenous 1.25 MW Marine Gas Turbine Generators for the Navy — closing a strategic gap in who makes a warship's onboard electrical power.
Manik Gupta
Author
Kalyani Strategic Systems and South Africa's Paramount used the Paris defence expo to debut the Simha 4x4, a clean-sheet light armoured vehicle engineered around NATO-qualified aggregates for fast localisation abroad. There is no customer yet — but the design intent signals where India's private defence champions want to play.
Manik Gupta
Author
Kochi's EyeROV has won one of India's largest marine-robotics contracts — a ₹47-crore Indian Navy order for indigenous underwater remotely operated vehicles. Founded in 2017 with a fully in-house tech stack and 100-plus deployments behind it, the startup is turning subsea inspection into a sovereign capability.
Manik Gupta
Author
Three back-to-back hits at Chandipur on 27 February 2026 — against approaching, receding and crossing targets — moved DRDO's man-portable air defence missile toward production clearance, as India races to replace Soviet-era Iglas and counter the low, slow drone threat exposed during Operation Sindoor.
Manik Gupta
Author
Chennai startup Big Bang Boom Solutions delivered the first lot of its indigenous Vajra Sentinel counter-drone system to the Indian Air Force on 20 May 2025, fast-tracked in the wake of Operation Sindoor. Five years from a boardroom jammer demo to a DGAQA-cleared system on the border — and a ₹200-crore-plus order behind it.
Manik Gupta
Author
DRDO and L&T's 25-tonne Zorawar put live rounds on target above 4,200 metres at Nyoma in eastern Ladakh, and was airlifted in by an IAF Il-76 — a milestone toward an air-portable combat vehicle the heavy Arjun and T-90 fleets simply cannot replace in the Himalayas.
Manik Gupta
Author
A Pune startup's autonomous, gun-armed surface drones — capable of 50 knots and operating through GPS denial — are heading to the Indian Navy under an iDEX order for a 12-boat swarm. It is India's first serious attempt to combine autonomy with lethal force at sea, and a case study in how the iDEX pipeline turns garage prototypes into warfighting kit.
Manik Gupta
Author
