Bangalore Startup Makes Drone Batteries India No Longer Imports

Indian farmers using spraying drones face an exhausting routine: carry six battery packs into the fields, swap them every 20 minutes, and hope the spares don't run out before the job is done.

Dreamfly Innovations is solving that problem by manufacturing high-performance drone batteries right in India. Founded in 2021 by Kajal Shah and Dr. Saurabh Markandeya, the Bangalore company just raised 12 crore rupees (about $1.4 million) to expand production of components the country's booming drone industry desperately needs.

The gap they spotted wasn't in drones themselves. India already has a thriving drone manufacturing sector. What it lacks is the supply chain underneath it, especially batteries that can handle India's extreme conditions.

Heat is the silent killer of battery performance. A hot battery loses power faster, ages quicker, and poses a fire risk. Dreamfly's thermal case design drops operating temperatures by up to 20 degrees Celsius while keeping the packs light enough that drones can still carry meaningful payloads.

The company builds batteries for specific Indian challenges. One model works at minus 30 degrees Celsius for high-altitude operations in the Himalayas. Another uses non-explosive graphene chemistry designed for agricultural drones that spray fields near crops and people.

Their customer list reads like India's industrial who's who: Tata Advanced Systems, Larsen & Toubro, and multiple drone manufacturers. Breaking into these accounts wasn't easy. Large defense and engineering firms test components slowly, but once a supplier clears their standards, the relationship tends to stick.

The Ripple Effect: Building batteries domestically solves more than just a logistics problem. It frees Indian drone makers from shipping delays and price swings they can't control. It creates skilled manufacturing jobs in deep tech. And it builds the foundation for India's electric aviation future, since the same battery engineering applies to larger aircraft.

Dreamfly employs 27 people now and is using its fresh funding to expand its facility and research team. The company holds two patents on its thermal and weight-reduction innovations.

India's drone market is expected to grow rapidly through 2030, driven by agriculture, defense, and delivery applications. Growth like that needs a component supply chain that can keep pace, and Dreamfly is betting that batteries are the perfect place to start building it.

Every Indian drone that flies a little longer on a domestically made battery is one less import dependency the country has to manage.