Drone manufacturer ideaForge raises $20 Mn

Drone manufacturer, ideaForge, closed its Series B funding round of $20 Million led by Florintree, growth-stage private equity firm based out of Mumbai headed by ex-Blackstone India head, Mathew Cyriac. The round also saw participation from its existing investors such as Celesta, a prominent deep tech investment fund, Infosys, Qualcomm and Infina, along with the Exim Bank of India.

Founded in 2007 by IIT Bombay alumni, ideaForge's drones are deployed by Defence, Homeland Security and Enterprise customers. Its customers also include the Indian Navy, Air Force, State Police Forces, BSF, NSG, CRPF, Adani, L&T, Indian Oil, Survey of India, Indian Railways, and so on. 

ideaForge Co-founder & CEO, Ankit Mehta commented, “ideaForge is very happy to be associated with Florintree, which has a proven track record of helping organisations unlock enterprise value. ideaForge has grown 10X in the last two years and we will use this funding to invest in R&D, international expansion and building a world-class team. We want to continue to create high performance, reliable and autonomous drones that inspire the adoption of this technology.”

Mathew Cyriac, executive chairman, Florintree Advisors, said, “Florintree has been tracking the drone sector closely for the last two years and ideaForge is one of the few globally competitive full stack players in the sector with scale and profitability. The strong order book built by the company is testament to the R&D work done by the team over the last 15 years and they are primed to grow exponentially. While the industry has proliferated in the last few years on the back of government policy, we expect ideaForge with its focus on building indigenous hardware within house software subsystems to gain an outsized market share in a rapidly growing industry.”