Mumbai. ideaForge Technology Limited, India’s leading unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology player, on July 16 announced a landmark milestone of over 1 million successful UAV flights completed by its customers across defence, homeland security, public safety, mapping, surveying, and industrial applications.
These missions executed at a global scale have helped save lives, strengthen national security, protect critical assets, and enable faster decision-making. The milestone is a testament to the performance, reliability, resilience, and autonomy of ideaForge’s UAV platforms, which have earned the trust of the Indian Armed Forces, government agencies, public sector organisations, private enterprises, and global institutions for critical operations.
Speaking on the occasion, Vipul Joshi, CFO and Whole-Time Director, ideaForge Technology Limited, said, “One million flights is a proud milestone, but for us, it is much more than just a number. It is a record of trust built one mission at a time. From the first ideaForge flight to one million sorties, our platforms have operated across some of the world’s most demanding terrains and harshest environmental and field conditions. Every flight has carried a purpose: to help our customers see farther, respond faster, protect lives, improve productivity, and complete missions where reliability cannot be negotiable.”
Adding further, Joshi said, “While the journey to our first million flights has been built over years of innovation, customer education, tech adoption, and operational deployment, we are confident that the next million will come much faster. As unmanned systems become integral to defence, homeland security, industrial inspection, and critical infrastructure, we expect our platforms to undertake a far wider range of missions than ever before and much more frequently. Building on the foundation of proven ISR capabilities, we are expanding into new domains, including combat drone and logistics capabilities and increasingly autonomous and resilient systems, to address the evolving needs of modern operations.”
For ideaForge, one million flights also mean one million opportunities to learn. Every sortie has helped us understand edge cases and real-world performance better, strengthen reliability, improve resilience, and build systems that are more capable of operating in complex and contested environments.
Conceived as a student project at IIT Bombay, a major turning point in ideaForge’s journey came when the founders watched India fighting the 26/11 terrorist attack in Mumbai with no UAV aerial surveillance capability of its own. That realisation sparked a journey of deep-tech innovation, and the nation’s pioneering enterprise in advanced Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for defence, homeland security, and enterprise applications.
Today, with 112 patents filed globally, its platforms are DGCA and DGQA Certified, recognised by NATO, and designed and manufactured under quality regimes aligned with aerospace and defence standards. The platforms are built specifically for the extreme operational and environmental demands India presents – sub-zero temperatures in Ladakh, scorching heat of the Thar desert, the humid coastal conditions across the vast coastline of India, and everything in between.
Over the years, ideaForge’s UAVs have supported a wide range of missions. They have assisted disaster response teams during floods, enabled crowd management during large public gatherings such as the Pandharpur Yatra, Kanwar Yatra, helped mitigate human-wildlife conflict, monitored critical infrastructure, played crucial role in world’s one of the largest mapping mission carried out under SVAMITVA Scheme, helped municipal corporations and public administrations for smart governance, augmented law enforcement agencies’ capabilities for enhanced public safety, and supported security forces for counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism (CICT) in the country’s most demanding operational environments, including Operation Sindoor. Equipped with advanced capabilities and real-time intelligence tools, the platforms have helped authorities make faster, better-informed decisions when every minute counts.
The milestone comes at a time when the company is expanding its portfolio beyond intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions into areas such as logistics support, long-endurance surveillance, combat capabilities, and next-generation autonomous systems.
