From hostel room to battlefield: Meet the 22-year-olds powering the Indian Army’s drone revolution

Jayant and Sourya aren’t defence scientists — they’re 22-year-old students from Hyderabad who built combat-ready drones in a college hostel.

Transcript

00:00They're just 22. Not graduates, not defense scientists. Meet the boys from Hyderabad who

00:08built kamikaze drones in a hostel room, now used by the Indian Army.

00:16Jayan's been building robots since class 5. And Shorya, a dual degree student, is obsessed

00:22with drones and defense systems. Together, they turned a college project into combat

00:27hardware. So how did two 22-year-olds with no military background end up supplying combat

00:32drones to the Indian Army?

00:33When me and Shorya started making some products, we started reaching out to different army personnel,

00:40colonels and department colonels in the army. We used to cold DM a lot, we used to cold message

00:45a lot on LinkedIn and luckily we got a reply from a department colonel who's from Chandigarh.

00:51They were invited for a no-contract, no-commission demo, just a trial. They showed up with 15

00:57different drone prototypes, from bomb droppers to kamikaze drones.

01:00And somehow they really liked our drones and we got our first order from them.

01:05The drones are fast, 300 km per hour and made of carbon fiber to survive hits.

01:10So the capabilities we are targeting, one of them would be the ruggedness of the drone itself.

01:17Like we go with all carbon fiber bodies, things that can really take aggressive maneuvers,

01:23even some amount of damage. We are going for modularity, which makes our drones extremely

01:28easy to modify into other variants. For example, you can have the same drone that can perform a

01:36variety of roles, from kamikaze to night vision to payload dropping, just with minor modifications.

01:43The Indian Army was impressed, but what about the soldiers flying them?

01:47We are focusing on the training program, the training regimen, through which we train soldiers from

01:51scratch to fly our most advanced drones. Modules like this, which can be used and which we can

01:57attach and detach from several types of drones. Their inspiration? Not Silicon Valley, not Shark Tank,

02:03but the war in Ukraine. Also when we have seen those Russian and Ukrainian videos, the war videos,

02:10we have seen that those people are making the same drones that we are making. So we thought of making it for

02:17the army. And as we have seen, the army was using DJI and Chinese drones. So we thought of making

02:23something in-house, assembling everything in-house. For Jayant, it was also personal.

02:29As my parents are also, like my mother was a retired inspector from the CRP and my father was also in

02:36the Air Force before. Were they nervous walking into army camps? Not really. We know what we are delivering.

02:42So the nervousness is not really there. Probably at the beginning, when we were presenting our

02:48trainer drones and, you know, to the military, it seemed similar to toys because of the size.

02:54And then we actually showed them like what the trainer drones could do. When we put on our FPV goggles

03:00and actually flew them at 70-80 km per hour around obstacles. Today, the team has grown. From a hostel

03:06project to a 12-member startup, they plan to scale up fast and build next-gen drones.

03:10We have a team of around 10 people. So in total, we are 12 members. So most of them are first-genites

03:16and then we have our batchmates as well. We intend to scale as fast as possible. We intend to

03:22set up large-scale production facilities and we intend to hire full-time engineers for both

03:27production and for research and development.