When Nagendran Kandasamy quit his corporate job at Boeing in 2014, he left with one conviction: that drones were a structural shift. A decade and two startups later, he leads Zulu Defence, a Bengaluru-based deeptech company that makes kamikaze drones, high-speed tactical UAVs, and multi-platform systems for the Indian Armed Forces and select international defence customers.

Kandasamy was introduced to drones early on. He has spent nearly nine years designing aircraft components. "From the age of 16 or 17, I wanted to do something on my own," he says.

In 2016, he launched his first startup, Throttle Aerospace, focused on last-mile heavy logistics using drones. By 2021, he had exited that venture, realising that civil drone operations in India were hemmed in by regulatory uncertainty and limited scale.

The pivot to defence was deliberate. "We got a very good team who can actually solve the national problem," Kandasamy tells AIM.

Along with Shashikumar Ramakrishnan and Rajagopal Sethuraman, he founded Zulu Defence in 2023, not just to build drones but also to rethink the underlying software architecture. "Product A alone can offer certain use cases. Product B alone can work for certain use cases. When you put it together, it works seamlessly and offers something else. That's what we did."

The Technology Stack

Zulu's flagship product is DRAP, a high-speed tactical drone clocking 180 kilometres per hour. It is now developing DRAP Max.

The startup also builds a loitering munition system in which, instead of mounting an expensive surveillance camera on a one-use kamikaze drone, Zulu has separated the sensor from the strike platform. A persistent ISR drone carries the optics; the loitering munition simply follows its cue. "No one has done it in the country," Kandasamy claims.

Zulu does not source critical components from adversarial nations. The cost premium, Kandasamy argues, is simply the price of not being stranded mid-conflict.

In the supply chain, 70% to 75% of materials are locally sourced, with a stated target to raise that figure each year. The remaining 25% to 30%, primarily optics, rare earth magnets, speciality semiconductors, and lithium batteries, still require imports. "The software is 100% indigenous," the Co-founder and CEO says. "We take open source and heavily modify, but we don't live in open source."

All products ship with 256-bit encryption, and the systems are designed to resist jamming and hacking attempts. "When I build a virus, I also need to build the antivirus," Kandasamy remarks. "It's a game, and we play it to a reasonable level."

With operational data off-limits, Zulu builds its own datasets. When tank images are unavailable, the team morphs and edits open-source visuals to construct synthetic datasets, then qualifies them internally before use.

The operating interface is designed to be tablet-based and intuitive, comparable to booking a cab. Refresher training is provided remotely via video call when personnel rotate within the Armed Forces.

Capital Plans and Workforce Overview

Zulu Defence is entirely VC-backed, having raised close to $987,000 across two rounds from 12 investors, including five institutional backers and seven angels, according to Tracxn. The first round closed in January 2024, with Finvolve participating in the $750,000 seed round.

Kandasamy says the pitch in the earliest round was just a PowerPoint. "None of the products were in reality, just on paper, in a simple PPT. We showed how the edition could change, and at that meeting itself, we got a good go. They committed."

Annual revenue stands at approximately ₹9.31 crore ($.1.1 million) as of March 2025.

Zulu sells exclusively to defence customers. The company supplies to the Indian Armed Forces and has begun supplying to the UAE. There is no subscription or SaaS model. "Defence doesn't buy in a subscription," Kandasamy says flatly. Civilian customers are also off the table. "We play with explosives. We play with the warhead. You cannot give it to random hands."

With large emergency procurement orders now on the books, Zulu says it is not urgently seeking fresh capital. A next round is planned to fund a four- to five-year R&D roadmap once existing orders are executed and cash cycles close.

The team currently stands at 80 people, a deliberately scaled-up number driven by the manufacturing demands. Last year, the company delivered close to 2,900 units. Around half the workforce is made up of freshers, trained in-house. Senior leadership requires 15-plus years of experience.

Competitive Moat and Market Outlook

While Zulu operates among competitors, including ideaForge, BotLab Dynamics, and Stravex, Kandasamy identifies the startup's moat as technology and design differentiation, including vertical-launch configurations and tube-deployable form factors. "We don't really rate the legacy design or legacy principle. We rethink and innovate."

On the defence startup ecosystem, he is broadly positive about policy direction, particularly the shift from manufacturing-in-India to design-in-India embedded in the updated Department for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade (DPIIT) framework. He says larger defence groups are now more likely to seek joint ventures with IP-owning startups than simply acquire foreign technology. Bureaucratic processing timelines, particularly for export clearances through SCOMET (Special Chemicals, Organisms, Materials, Equipment, and Technologies) and DPIIT, remain a point of friction.

Internationally, the company has distributors in the UAE and Europe. The startup is exploring assembly plants abroad, a model where sub-assemblies are shipped from India and finalised in-country, which he says reduces landed cost for customers while keeping manufacturing IP in India.

India, he argues, has the manufacturing scale and startup density to play a significant role in this shift. As conflict reshapes the global security order, the pressure on nations to build sovereign defence capability has never been sharper. Zulu Defence's answer is technology that is designed, built, and owned in India.