After investing in a few foreign startups and VC firms, Infosys has today announced that it has poured an undisclosed sum into Indian drone startup ideaForge. The funding will be provided from the company’s $500 million Innovation Fund.
With the new funding coming to the company, it will now be looking forward to tap the industrial market. The company is already present in defense and commercial applications vertical.
Currently, the drones of ideaForge are used by Indian Armed Forces for surveillance, crowd monitoring and rescue operations, and its commercial applications include verticals such as energy, utilities, telecom and agriculture.
Commenting about the investment, Ritika Suri, Global Head of Corporate Development & Ventures at Infosys, said in a statement:
ideaForge’s high performance UAVs, which have been designed and built in India, have significant potential in industrial use cases. We are looking forward to working with ideaForge and bringing their technology, expertise, and solutions to our clients to unlock new business insights from operational data that has previously been difficult to obtain.
Ankit Mehta, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at ideaForge, said:
We are very excited to have Infosys as an investor and a partner for exploring UAV services and solutions for global customers. This partnership will play an important role in our industrial expansion to address a wide variety of data acquisition and analysis needs.
The startup was founded by three IIT-Bombay graduates — Ankit Mehta, Rahul Singh and Ashish Bhat in the year 2007. It was earlier incubated at SINE IIT Bombay and CIIE, Ahmedabad.
The company develops and produces Unmanned Aerial Systems that offer unmatched usability due to its user-centric innovations and design. With focus on sustainable use in operation, it ensures highest quality and performance of products.
After setting up the Innovation Fund in 2013, Infosys beefed up the fund five-fold to $500 million in 2015 to provide financing to start-ups and new technologies. The investment in ideaForge marks the eleventh investment made by Infosys through its Innovation Fund.
