In the age of digital transformation, the market revolves around data. Companies that provide technologies capable of mining such data become crucial for personal, public, and property safety. The quality of the data collected drives precise actionable insights that safeguard, optimize, and enhance resources across various segments.

Additionally, since the global war on terrorism began, it has become imperative for the law enforcement agencies across the world to be equipped with the latest surveillance gear, which provides them actionable insights on a real-time basis. The rising incidents of crime, natural disasters, fires, burglary, animal poaching, and the growing awareness about benefits of constant surveillance among the people have paved the way to holistic drone technology solution.

One company that is redefining technology and building the infrastructure & systems needed to provide integrated drone solutions across industries is Asteria Aerospace. Today, the company has forayed into various sectors like the government (military, paramilitary,forest dept, police force etc),oil & gas, energy, city surveillance, infrastructure

companies, and agriculture, to name a few.

The Genesis
Nihar Vartak & Neel Mehta, the co-founders & directors of Asteria Aerospace have known each other since 2002, when they both studied Aerospace Engineering at Perdue University. After his graduation, Neel pursued Masters in the same field at Georgia Tech and subsequently worked at Rockwell Collins Inc., USA, where he gained extensive experience in flight control design & analysis, simulation, testing, and certification of end-to-end flight control systems for several commercial aircraft programs. Nihar, on the other hand, worked at Boeing Co. post graduation, where he was a Systems and Flight Test engineer. He later went on to join Accenture, Chicago, as a Process and Strategy Manager (Supply Chain).

Asteria Aerospace provides end-to-end customized solution to its clients across industries, which includes product design, avionics,software(embedded, desktop,mobile and cloud), and advanced analytics–enabling remote monitoring across multiple sites

In 2011, the duo decided to quit their jobs, and begin evaluating and validating various business models. They built several drone prototypes to understand the full technology stack: from hardware to software. This was the beginning of Asteria Aerospace.

“We saw huge potential for drone technology in India. We wanted to bring in our knowledge & expertise to start some thing in our country. Also, from a market perspective, we noticed a dearth of new tech in the defence segment as not many companies were providing end-to-end customized solution. So, we decided to enter the market with a focus on the drone surveillance operations that were essentially required for the military and paramilitary purposes,” speaks Neel.

Mission Ready-Anytime, Anywhere
Based in Bangalore, Asteria Aerospace has grown to a 60 plus member team. The company’s growth is result of increased market share in India, APAC and the Middle East regions by delivering customized drone solutions across various sectors. These solutions involve integration of multiple features with the drones, such as 360-degree cameras (HD quality), thermal imaging cameras, 2-D/3-D mapping and defogging. In terms of endurance, flexibility and durability, the drones can be modified based on client specifications and be rapidly deployed. They require minimal setup time and an individual can be trained within hours. The scalable cloud, mobile, and desktop-based platform further enables remote monitoring across multiple sites. “We took almost three years to develop and launch our newest product: GENESIS. Now, with Genesis, we have a secure & scalable cloud based platform which integrates our UAVs to provide high quality actionable data in real-time to everyone, every where. This is the future and we will be revolutionizing the way people monitor, access, and safeguard their critical assets,” concludes Nihar, on a positive note.