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India: Drone startup Garuda Aerospace raises USD22M in Series A Funding Round

India-based drone start­up, Garu­da Aero­space, recent­ly raised USD22 mil­lion in a Series A Fund­ing Round led by ven­ture cap­i­tal firm Sphit­i­Cap, reports a press release. The com­pa­ny has invest­ed USD12 mil­lion with the rest com­ing from a vari­ety of glob­al and angel investors.

Pallav Kumar Singh, a Man­ag­ing Part­ner at Sphit­i­Cap, com­ment­ed. “Garu­da Aero­space has built dif­fer­ent types of drones and are a lead­ing play­er in the drone sec­tor and one to watch out for.” Adding, “Drones will play a major role in near­ly every busi­ness sec­tor in the future.”

Garu­da Aero­space said in a state­ment. “These funds will be used to scale up and expand oper­a­tions, as well as being used for R&D, train­ing drone pilots, and help­ing cre­ate new employ­ment by increas­ing our foot­print in both Tier 2 and 3 cities.”

Agnish­war Jayaprakash

The start­up aims to achieve sig­nif­i­cant dom­i­nance in rur­al areas, where its drones “enhanced with pay­load capac­i­ties, endurance, qual­i­ty of sen­sors, and data embed­ding with more tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions” can improve acces­si­bil­i­ty, reduce trans­port costs and offer fast deliv­ery times.

Garu­da Aero­space aims to sell 25,000 drones over the next 18 months and is look­ing to export 10,000 of them to around 100 coun­tries.

Agnish­war Jayaprakash, Founder and CEO of Garu­da Aero­space remarked, “After my recent expe­ri­ence at Davos, it is clear we have the poten­tial to scale glob­al­ly with the drone man­u­fac­tur­ing based in India. We aim to help India become the drone hub of the world by 2030.”

This con­fi­dence is assist­ed by Indi­an Prime Min­is­ter, Naren­dra Modi Ji, who helped the launch of 100 Garu­da Kisan Drones to 100 vil­lages dur­ing 2022. Mean­while, the famous for­mer Indi­an crick­eter, MS Dhoni, who was cap­tain, bats­man and wick­et­keep­er of the India nation­al side has recent­ly joined Garu­da as a brand ambas­sador and share­hold­er. At the age of 41 years-old, Dhoni now plays crick­et for the Chen­nai Super Kings in the IPL.

MS Dhoni (image: Chen­nai Super Kings)

Found­ed in 2015, the com­pa­ny today has over 200 staff; a fleet of 400 drones; and a team of more than 500 oper­a­tors across 26 dif­fer­ent Indi­an cities. Garu­da’s drones are glob­al­ly used across var­i­ous busi­ness sec­tors includ­ing agri­cul­ture, map­ping, infra­struc­ture, defence, min­ing and project inspec­tions. Its web­site states “Our goal is to become Indi­a’s first drone uni­corn start­up by impact­ing one bil­lion lives.”

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.garudaaerospace.com

(Top image: Garu­da Aero­space)

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