Introducing Altnautica: Building the Intelligence Layer for India's Drone Revolution
India has over 200 drone companies. Almost every one of them builds the same thing: a basic flight controller wired to motors on a frame. They compete on price because they have no differentiation. The drones they build can fly from point A to point B. That's it. No computer vision. No autonomous navigation. No real-time decision-making. No intelligence.
DJI dominates globally because they understood, earlier than anyone, that the drone is a flying computer. Their competitive advantage is a custom chip that integrates flight control, video processing, and AI inference on one piece of silicon. Nobody in India has built anything comparable.
Until now.
What We're Building
Altnautica ADOS is a single flight computer that integrates an AI-capable compute module with a dedicated autopilot processor, a long-range HD video system with 50km+ range, and 4G/5G connectivity on one PCB. Plug it into any drone frame and you've got an intelligent platform capable of computer vision, autonomous flight, and AI-powered decisions.
The board costs sub-$300 in components. A DJI drone with comparable intelligence starts at $500 and goes well above $2,000. Our component cost is less than DJI's retail margin.
We call it the "Android of drones." DJI is Apple, proprietary, expensive, locked down. We're the open platform everyone builds on.
Why Now
Four things came together at the right time.
DJI is banned in India. Since 2022, India has restricted import of foreign-manufactured drones. The biggest competitor is locked out. The vacuum in intelligent drone capability is real, growing, and unfilled.
The open-source stack has matured. Open-source autopilot firmware runs on over a million drones. Our long-range HD video system delivers full HD at 50km+ range using affordable hardware. AI processing frameworks provide industrial-grade robotics middleware. Every piece of the puzzle is production-ready.
India's drone market is growing at 24% CAGR. From $0.47 billion in 2024 to a projected $1.39 billion by 2030. The government is actively subsidizing domestic drone manufacturing through the PLI scheme, Drone Shakti initiative, and iDEX defence grants.
Compute is cheap enough. Our AI-capable compute module delivers a quad-core processor with hardware video encoding for under $75. Five years ago, this level of edge compute wasn't possible at drone-compatible power budgets.
Open Source as Strategy
We're publishing the ADOS platform schematics as open source. This isn't idealism. It's strategy.
Android didn't win mobile by building the best phone. It won by being the platform everyone built on. Red Hat didn't win enterprise Linux by keeping the code secret. They won by creating an ecosystem that made the commercial layer indispensable.
Our open-source Community Edition creates adoption. Developers, drone builders, research labs, and universities use the platform, build on it, and contribute back. The ecosystem grows. When enterprises need fleet management, military-grade encryption, autonomous mission planning, and certified configurations, that's the Enterprise Edition.
One hardware design serves every vertical: agricultural monitoring, industrial inspection, security patrol, cargo delivery, survey and mapping, defence ISR, and emergency response. The differentiation happens in software, not hardware.
The Roadmap
Phase 1 is the ADOS prototype. INR 20 lakhs of angel funding builds 3-5 flying drones, enters competitions, secures Letters of Intent from drone manufacturers, and proves the architecture works.
Phase 2 takes the proven ADOS architecture and scales it into a 75 kg payload autonomous VTOL drone with 330+ km hybrid range. Built in India, deployed in Australia, targeting the $2.4 billion mining, emergency, and agriculture logistics market. The ADOS platform evolves directly into the VTOL flight computer. Zero throwaway work.
Phase 3 is production deployment, CASA certification, and commercial operations in Australia.
The Conviction
This isn't speculative R&D. Every component in our stack has millions of units deployed. Our compute module has sold tens of millions of units across its product family. Open-source autopilot firmware flies on over a million drones. Our video system uses mass-produced, readily available hardware. The innovation is the integration, putting proven components on a single PCB with clean engineering.
The technology exists. The market exists. The regulatory environment is favorable. The gap is documented. What's required is execution: design the board, fabricate it, fly it, open-source it, build the ecosystem.
We intend to build it. From Bangalore. For the world.
Altnautica is a deep tech drone startup based in Bangalore, India. We're building the open intelligence platform for the next generation of autonomous drones.