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1. At a Glance
Revenue from operations of ₹68.59 crore against ₹12.78 crore in the same quarter last year — a 437% jump that sounds heroic until you remember the base was a quarter in which a drone company with over 50% of its workforce in engineering booked less revenue than a mid-sized wedding.
Operating Profit came in at ₹2.33 crore, up from a negative ₹19.08 crore. PAT stayed below zero at ₹-2.59 crore, versus ₹-23.56 crore a year ago. EPS was ₹-0.60 against ₹-5.45.
Elsewhere in the quarter, the company allotted 6,289,308 equity shares at ₹795 each under a QIP, raising ₹500 crore, and received a Letter of Intent from the Technology Development Board for loan assistance of up to ₹151 crore for its YETI logistics platform. Management says the deployed UAV fleet crossed one million customer missions and that an ideaForge drone takes off somewhere in the world every two minutes — a statistic that turns the company into a sort of airborne metronome.
The order book stood at ₹256.8 crore as of June 30, 2026, down from ₹314.2 crore at March-end, which is what happens when your stated priority for the year is executing the order book rather than growing it. Management’s phrasing: “our priority for the year is conversion of the opening order book into revenue.” Depreciation for the quarter was ₹14.21 crore — comfortably larger than Operating Profit, and the reason the bottom line and the EBITDA line disagree about what kind of quarter this was.
2. Introduction
ideaForge Technology Limited was incorporated in 2007 and manufactures Unmanned Aircraft Systems. The origin story, per the company’s own telling, begins in 2004–08 with founders building one of India’s first quadrotor drones at a college fest — a sentence that would be insufferable if the thing hadn’t then been incubated at SINE, IIT Bombay, and gone on to supply autopilots to government labs by 2008.
Between 2009 and 2013 the company developed the NETRA UAV with a Government of India entity, demonstrated it at DefExpo, made its first drone sale to a state police department, and — in the single most Indian line ever printed in an investor presentation — had an early prototype featured in the Bollywood film 3 Idiots. Most engineering companies list patents. This one lists a filmography.
The 2014–18 stretch brought NETRA V2, V3, the SWITCH UAV, and a ₹38.8 Cr Government of India contract. In 2022–23 came a US subsidiary, India’s largest Mini-VTOL contract at ₹187.5 Cr, and the NSE/BSE listing. The 2024–26 chapter added NETRA 5, SWITCH V2, the Q6 V2 Geo platform, and 100+ global patent filings, plus MoD orders of ₹137.4 Cr for Mini UAVs and ₹107.3 Cr for AFDS/Tactical and Hybrid UAVs. The ZOLT UAV was displayed at India’s 77th Republic Day Parade.
More recently: in April 2026 the company signed an MoU with Japan’s Digital Media Professionals Inc. to develop AI drones and enter that market. In November 2025 it announced MoD orders of ₹32 crore for Hybrid UAVs and roughly ₹75 crore for AFDS/Tactical UAVs. CRISIL changed the corporate rating to CRISIL BBB/Negative on November 6, 2025. On June 4, 2026, India Ratings assigned an IND BBB/Stable issuer rating.
FY26 closed with revenue of ₹226 crore, up from ₹161 crore in FY25, and a net loss of ₹17 crore. Nineteen years from a college fest to a Republic Day flypast, with the accounting still catching its breath.
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3. Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?
They build drones, and then they build almost everything inside the drones, which is the unusual part.
The portfolio splits into defence (69% of FY26 revenue, up from 59% in FY25) and civil (31%, down from 41%). Defence and dual-use platforms — NETRA 5, NETRA V4 PRO, SWITCH, SWITCH V2 — handle border security, coastal patrol, search-and-rescue and military surveillance, with operational range up to 20 km and endurance up to 150 minutes. Civil runs on Q4i and Q6 V2, covering surveillance, disaster management, traffic monitoring and mapping, at up to 10 km and 60 minutes. The naming convention is a genuine achievement: somewhere a product manager successfully argued that “All Terrain Dominator” belongs on a spec sheet next to flight time in minutes.
Management’s framing of the strategy is to “own the consequential technologies and deliver a complete solution” — the consequential stack being resilient anti-jam communications, navigation that works when someone is spoofing your GPS, secure command-and-control software, edge compute, and mission payloads. Patents are distributed across subsystems with the tidiness of a seating chart: 12 on the airframe, 9 on payloads, 8 on ground control software, 7 on motor and propeller, 6 on the software stack, 4 on battery, 2 each on control system and ground comms, 1 on autopilot hardware/software. Total active patents: 112, of which 61 are granted and 51 pending as of June 30, 2026.
The software layer is BlueFire Touch, the FLYGHT app, and FLYGHT CLOUD, which stores footage, post-processes it, and now produces automated video summaries and AI-based event search — because someone eventually noticed that a million missions generates an unwatchable quantity of aerial video, and that the customer, in management’s words, “is not getting their outcome merely by operating a drone.”
Two development platforms sit ahead of the current range. ZOLT, the tactical UAV, entered series production this quarter and flew its first hybrid-propulsion variant. YETI, the logistics UAV, completed a tethered hover test with all subsystems integrated — a milestone that, described plainly, means a very large drone was tied to the ground and permitted to hover, which is exactly
