DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations – a new age business

What I see as Drone business is moving towards the DaaS(Drone as a Service) with this drone to give service for a use case it needs

• Hardware(payloads, batteries, chargers, and communication system), software, service. On the pure hardware side India mostly imports and assembles components.
• Software and embedded sub-systems, which includes the GCS software, which enables the controlling and management for our UAVs and autopilot sub-system, which enables remote control and autonomous completion of flights., in this space some of Indian players like IdeaForge have their own tech stack but every one don’t do this.
• Solutions, which enable industry/application-specific software that enhances the value of our UAVs to the end customer.

With DaaS which is predominantly for enterprise services, the service provider has to provide specific use case specific customization to work. Let’s say you need agriculture drone service which needs to inspect crops which will change with crop type, like rice or wheat, now you want to inspect for pesticide need that get changed as type of crop and disease. This is why most of the services end work is getting predominantly now which is not too specialized etc it is more of IT service kind of work.

There are two subsegments internally in this ecosystem

• Training – Pilots, software operators
• Operation and maintenance

Why I am bit negative on the Droneacharya

• DaaS gets mainstream and the pilot needs to come under the corporate team, most of the time end up having internal team or drone providers to provide training with the purchase.
• If I look at companies like IdeaForge they are constantly improving the software which goes in the drone to help autopilot and fail safe mechanisms to return to its base as tech in its drones. This kind of tech will bring down pilot need for per Drone to more of an array of drones get operated in the control room.
• As of now a lot of drones are getting imported which bring business for Droneacharya but as Indian drone companies get major share they will have service of training internally. This can be seen in IdeaForge.

With this thought in mind I don’t see how Droneacharya will grow exponentially high and become attractive.

It is just my thought.