Droneacharya Aerial Innovations Ltd
This is a publically listed company in India. The company is into drone pilot training, drone-based services such as surveys, processing of drone data, and GIS training.
23 DGCA-authorised Remote Pilot Training Organisations certified in India, Drone-Acharya is one among them.
In FY23 the company has completed training more than 350 DGCA drone pilots and 600 other drones and GIS-related training. Moreover, the company has counseled and educated more than 6,000 students in the year
Currently, 60 people employed
They are working in a franchise model
Industry
What I see as the 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 include the GCS software, which enables the controlling and management of our UAVs and autopilot sub-system, which enables remote control and autonomous completion of flights., in this space some of the Indian players like IdeaForge have their own tech stack but everyone doesn’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 an agriculture drone service that needs to inspect crops that will change with crop type, like rice or wheat, now you want to inspect for pesticide needs that get changed as the 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 a bit negative about the Droneacharya
DaaS gets mainstream and the pilot needs to come under the corporate team, most of the time ends up having an 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 a tech in its drones. This kind of tech will bring down pilot need per Drone to more of an array of drones getting operated in the control room.
As of now a lot of drones are getting imported which brings business for Droneacharya but as Indian drone companies get a 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.