India’s defence-tech startups are thriving

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. ANIRUDH SHARMA was a computer-science undergraduate with no training in aerospace when he co-founded Digantara, which gathers intelligence on satellite movements, in 2020. Today it employs 150 people in India, Singapore and America and is valued at more than $65m.

That may be a modest sum by Western standards. But it makes Digantara one of the big success stories in India’s flourishing defence-and-aerospace startup scene. “The Indian defence-tech ecosystem is really buzzing right now," says Suyash Singh, the founder of GalaxEye, which provides radar and other imagery from satellites.

In part this is because India’s startup ecosystem is evolving more broadly. Venture-capital firms and freshly minted billionaires are looking beyond consumer apps as places to invest. Defence-tech firms have benefited from the Indian government’s efforts to promote indigenisation.

The most immediate reason for the buzz, however, has been the shock of war. Earlier this year India suffered from a terrorist attack for which it blamed Pakistani militants. It conducted air strikes against Pakistan, a campaign it called Operation Sindoor, triggering a four-day air-and-missile war.

India’s high-end missiles performed well, but its air defences were “stressed by drone saturation" and the challenge of distinguishing real weapons from decoys, says Sameer Lalwani of the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank in Washington, forcing it to use expensive interceptors against cheap projectiles. Just days after the guns fell silent, India launched “emergency procurement" worth almost $5bn. That sum is around 25% of its annual capital spending on defence, notes Mr Lalwani.