What is your focus at ideaForge?

ideaForge builds small, portable drones that can be used for surveillance and mapping. We specialize in building systems that offer high-performance, reliability, and autonomy for mission-critical applications such as defense, homeland security, and enterprise asset monitoring. Our drones have some of the best performing capabilities in their category and class, which means delivering maximum flight times and the ability to deliver meaningful missions at very long ranges.

From the beginning, we have focused on delivering drones for defense and military applications. We wanted to make our systems as autonomous as we could, so that it does not require a lot of training or specialized skills to operate ideaForge systems. Designing for defense applications meant that we also must ensure our drones can operate in all sorts of extreme environmental conditions. Particularly since we are building this in India, product ruggedness is key – we have built drones for operations in very cold environments down to -30 degrees, very high altitudes at more than 6,000 meters, extremely hot environments, coastal marshy environments.

To date, ideaForge drones have completed over 350,000 flights with various customers. Today, an ideaForge drone takes off on a mission nearly every five minutes.

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What sets ideaForge technology apart from your competitors?

The performance of our platform is what sets us apart. We have worked very hard to design a platform that combines very high performance with a lightweight and easy-to-use package. The capability of operating the drones in any extreme condition and the autonomy we deliver on the system for its operations shows we are not competing with a drone in a box.

In terms of technology, we add value to each and every subsystem of the drone that we build and are able to deliver that outcome in a very condensed and lightweight package. We have over 62 filed patents and 25 granted, which shows our focus on innovative system design.

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Congratulations on your recent IPO at ideaForge. Reflecting back, what are some of the most important factors that have brought the company success to this point?

We've always focused technology as our most important pillar, continuing to sustain leading-edge performance in our technology. Even in the most difficult times when operating on lean budgets, we would always invest in pushing the technology further over anything else. That mindset of always ensuring that the intrinsic value of the business is preserved and continuously advancing, helped us to be very prepared when real opportunities arose to scale the business.

We found like-minded investors in people like Celesta, Qualcomm, Infosys, and others. All of them knew what it takes to be in the tech business, and they were critical to this journey. They helped us to ensure that fundamentally we were building a robust technology stack and a solid, scalable business. 

Of course, capital really helps. The fact that we were incubated in the early days when we did not have any technology or money allowed us to slowly chip away at the fundamental technology. We were always very frugal about how we have spent our capital, being very long-term focused in our mindset. We have also always worked to build a profitable business with sustainable margins.

Almost every startup goes through ups and downs and will require sacrifices and tough choices – you need the genuine passion and motivation behind your idea that keeps you making the right decisions for the business.

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What is your long-term vision for ideaForge looking forward?

We have built a couple of categories of systems and products that are doing well in the market which we will of course continue to iterate to ensure future generations offer improved performance, reliability, and even greater autonomy.

Eventually we will move beyond that and unlock more use cases and additional capabilities. We want to expand the number of categories we address, building larger systems that can straddle surveillance, enterprise use, civil use, and logistics. We’re also looking at exploring the drone-as-a-service opportunity in our own unique approach that will allow us to build a scalable opportunity which could be franchised out and constructed as a services solution, allowing it to be deployed anywhere in the world.

Lastly, we are aiming to expand into other markets. Particularly in the West and the U.S. in particular, we believe there is a lot of potential and our technology can be very competitive.

How have you approached navigating the inevitable setbacks associated with founding a technology startup?

My co-founders and I have practiced a lot of patience, keeping our faith in the domain and in the potential of the market. For our sector, the potential was delayed in unlocking at different junctures due to regulatory hurdles and lack of adequate exposure for the end customers. We remained focused, ensuring we were always advancing on the technology side, and confident the market would mature. Now we’ve managed to gain great traction in defense and enterprise applications, and we believe that we haven't even started to address the largest market opportunities within urban air mobility and logistics.

We also stuck together closely as a team. For many years, we had to sustain the company from our own revenue because we were not funded. We were together as a team all through this journey. That was high motivation because we’re friends, first and foremost, working on this together and having fun. It never felt like a chore or never like any one of us was doing it alone.

What advice would you give to other early-stage tech entrepreneurs and founders?

One of the things that I believe in most is that, if you are going to start a company, it must be for the right reasons. If you start a company only to make money, it will be very difficult. Almost every startup goes through ups and downs and will require sacrifices and tough choices – you need the genuine passion and motivation behind your idea that keeps you making the right decisions for the business. The end goal of a business is to create value for customers or bring about a change in the world, and to be able to do it profitably. There has to be genuine belief in all the team members that we are focused and working toward the same goals.

Business experience and expertise in scaling a business is an important part of the journey. Sometimes the founders themselves will have a lot of experience and sometimes they may not. If you’re inexperienced in the journey of building a business, you must bring in that knowledge.

How can investors best support early-stage founders?

I believe that the best marriage together between founders and investors is the one focused on building a business together. Our investors, including Celesta, had an intense desire to build a business and not to increase the valuation of the business. Both sides should be less concerned with raising the valuation of the business, and more so with creating value in the business. Investors should allow entrepreneurs to run the business and offer their support as trusted advisors. If you are working together in that spirit of partnership, the valuation increase will take care of itself as the outcome of building a business.