Within two months of starting their start-up company, Apollyon Dynamics, two 20-year-old engineering students from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS) Hyderabad have shocked India's defence community by creating and selling state-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to Army units in Jammu, Haryana's Chandimandir, Bengal's Panagarh, and Arunachal Pradesh. Their goal is to lessen India's reliance on foreign drones.
Sourya Choudhury, a student of electrical engineering from Kolkata, and Jayant Khatri, a mechanical engineering student from Ajmer, Rajasthan, constructed their drones using off-the-shelf components, modified the systems for Indian terrain, and sent cold messages to Army commanders on LinkedIn, The Times of India reports.
"I just started shooting cold emails to whoever I could find... Luckily, a colonel responded and called us to Chandigarh for a demo," Khatri told the Times of India.
A live demonstration of drone racing and bomb dropping, followed by additional demonstrations to military regiments, was what followed. Orders started coming in, and the business was established.
Their flagship product is a kamikaze drone that can reach speeds of over 300 kmph, which is five times faster than typical commercial UAVs, and it can precisely deliver one kilogramme payloads, The Times of India reports.
"Our drones are not just fast — they can't be detected on radar,” Choudhury says.
Six second-year students currently make up the team, which is developing next-generation fixed-wing and VTOL platforms to increase mission flexibility. Additionally, they provide military personnel — even those who have never flown before — with practical training.
"Our shared love of robotics brought us together. We started with a defence-tech club on campus. Then came the orders. That's when we knew we had to go big," Choudhury said.
