Drone manufacturer ideaForge has closed its Series B funding round of $20 million led by Florintree, which is helmed by the former Blackstone India private equity co-head, Mathew Cyriac. 

The round also saw participation from its existing investors such as Celesta, which is a prominent deep tech investment fund, Infosys, Qualcomm and Infina, along with the Exim Bank of India.

Founded in 2007, ideaForge is packed with more than 15 years of research and development (R&D) with over 20 global patents. It dominates the Indian market with its drones being deployed for a mission every six minutes by defence, homeland security and enterprise customers. 

With a proven delivery track record and a large order book, ideaForge boasts of being the first Indian OEM to bag repeat contracts from the Indian Army for its SWITCH UAVs. Its customers also include the Indian Navy, Air Force, State Police Forces, BSF, NSG, CRPF, Adani, L&T, Indian Oil, Survey of India, Indian Railways, and so on. 

“ideaForge is very happy to be associated with Florintree, which has a proven track record of helping organisations unlock enterprise value. ideaForge has grown 10X in the last two years and we will use this funding to invest in R&D, international expansion and building a world-class team. We want to continue to create high performance, reliable and autonomous drones that inspire the adoption of this technology,” said ideaForge co-founder and CEO Ankit Mehta.

“Florintree has been tracking the drone sector closely for the last two years and ideaForge is one of the few globally competitive full stack players in the sector with scale and profitability. The strong order book built by the company is testament to the R&D work done by the team over the last 15 years and they are primed to grow exponentially. While the industry has proliferated in the last few years on the back of government policy, we expect ideaForge with its focus on building indigenous hardware within house software subsystems to gain an outsized market share in a rapidly growing industry,” added Mathew Cyriac, executive chairman, Florintree Advisors, with serial IPOs wins in defence and aerospace technology.