Infosys invests in home-grown drone maker ideaForge

Infosys Ltd, India's second-largest software services exporter, said on Wednesday it has invested an undisclosed amount in homegrown drone maker ideaForge Technology Pvt Ltd.

The investment was made from the Innovation Fund, the IT company said in a stock exchange filing.

Infosys said that ideaForge has built Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that have been widely deployed by the Indian armed forces for surveillance, crowd monitoring and rescue operations. These UAVs also have commercial applications in verticals such as energy, utilities, telecom and agriculture.

The startup's UAVs feature fully autonomous operation, cutting edge failsafe technology, high endurance, image intelligence with live feed, and support for complex payloads such as thermal and high-resolution imagery, Infosys said.

''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,'' said Ritika Suri, executive vice president and global head of corporate development and ventures at Infosys.

Ankit Mehta, co-founder and chief executive of ideaForge, said that the backing from Infosys will help the company in playing an important role in its industrial expansion to address a wide variety of data acquisition and analysis needs.

The investment is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

Mumbai-based ideaForge was founded by IIT Bombay alumni in 2007. It was earlier incubated at SINE IIT Bombay and CIIE, Ahmedabad. Other drone startups in the country include Edall Systems, AirPix and Airwood Aerostructures Pvt Ltd. Chennai-based Airwood had raised seed funding from StartupXseed Ventures LLP in May this year.