Meet the Odisha Start-up Building Drones, Killer Robots and Missiles

There is a certain irony in the fact that one of India's most promising defence start-ups traces its origins not to a military campus or a technology incubator in Bengaluru, but to a sedimentation problem in a dam in Odisha.

Bodhisattwa Sanghapriya, co-founder and chief executive of IG Defence studied engineering at Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology (VSSUT) in Burla, Odisha and later earned a Master of Business Administration from Indian Institute of Management Sambalpur. He was never, by his own admission, the kind of student who chased marks. What he chased instead was the question that drives engineers at their best: how do things work?

Entrepreneurial Journey

That curiosity found its first serious outlet in his first year at VSSUT when a group of students took on the challenge of monitoring sedimentation in the Hirakud dam using satellite and rocketry technology. What began as a student initiative spiralled into Asia's first multi-purpose student rocketry mission, a project that earned national recognition, was mentioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Mann ki Baat radio address and was subsequently adopted by the Indian Space Research Organisation.

"Entrepreneurship has been my greatest university," Sanghapriya says, looking back on the decade that followed and recounting his experiences of building a defence-technology company from scratch.

IG Defence began in 2018 under the name IG Drones, serving industrial and enterprise customers in infrastructure, mining, energy and surveying. The founders—Sanghapriya, Om Prakash, Santosh Mishra and Shuvam Dash—were solving real problems for clients: mapping terrain, monitoring pipelines and surveying construction sites, while simultaneously building a technology stack that they understood could do far more than commercial mapping.

As India's strategic priorities shifted and the government's push toward indigenous defence manufacturing gathered momentum, IG Drones evolved into IG Defence. Along the way, the company developed a series of industry firsts: India's first 5G-enabled drone, India's first indigenous defence drone simulator and a range of advanced first-person-view (FPV) and long-range strike drone platforms designed specifically for modern battlefield requirements.

Defence manufacturing, Sanghapriya emphasises, is different from conventional technology one. Every component, line of code and integrated system must perform without failure in environments where operational outcomes—and lives—depend on it. The supply chain challenges alone would have broken a less determined team. Sophisticated components are difficult to source domestically. The quality bar is relentless. The testing cycles are long.

DIY Technology

IG Defence's response to these challenges has been to build in-house. It has invested heavily in developing internal capabilities across artificial intelligence, electronics, aerodynamics, software engineering, system integration, testing and manufacturing. Rather than relying on imported subsystems or foreign technology partnerships, the team has built its own technology stack.

"Our biggest differentiator is that our products are designed around operational realities rather than laboratory assumptions," Sanghapriya says. The design philosophy is the same for all platforms: build for the field, not the presentation room.

That philosophy has translated into market traction. The company has secured multiple engagements across defence, homeland security and strategic infrastructure sectors.

The government's emphasis on indigenous procurement under Atmanirbhar Bharat has created a policy environment that actively favours domestic manufacturers.

The company has raised approximately $6mn to date, through institutional investors including venture-capital fund Finvolve and India Accelerator, a start-up facilitator, along with other strategic partners. Sanghapriya says that the money was deployed on product development, manufacturing expansion, R&D, talent acquisition and operational capability building.

While Bhubaneswar continues to be the R&D hub, IG Defence has a corporate office in Noida. It achieved more than 300% growth over the past two years. The next funding round hopes to raise $20mn.

The 2029–30 ambition is of ₹10,000cr domestic order pipeline, expanding export markets and a deepening technology portfolio.

India is no longer just a consumer of advanced defence technologies. The start-ups building in this space are doing something that defence public-sector undertakings and large integrators have not consistently delivered: combining speed, innovation, operational understanding and manufacturing capability in a single organisation. That combination, in a market about to spend ₹20,000cr on unmanned systems, is exactly what the moment requires.