India-based UAV startup General Aeronautics lands nearly $1M in pre-Series A funding for precision agriculture drones

General Aeronautics (GA), a Bangalore, India-based UAV startup that specializes in drones for precision agriculture, today announced it has raised nearly $1 million (INR 65 million) in pre-Series A financing led by Mela Ventures. In conjunction with the funding, GA also announced that Parthasarathy N.S, Managing Partner at Mela Ventures, will be joining its board of directors.

The startup plans to use the fresh funding to expand its go-to-market programs and continue to invest in the areas of high reliability and efficient spraying, operational support including training Drone Pilots.

Founded just a year ago, General Aeronautics designs and develops unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) towards societal and security applications, including agri-solutions, medical solutions (emergency response management). GA is incubated in the Indian Institute of Science’s incubation center.

Founded by India’s aircraft designer and Padma Sri awardee Dr. Kota Harinarayana and Abhishek Burman along with Dr. Anutosh Moitra & Air Cmde P K Choudhary (Retd.), the startup’s mission is to bring the best of the aircraft design practices to the field of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle systems and provide efficient, reliable and cost-effective drone systems to address agricultural and other societal needs.

Incubated at the Society for Innovation and Development (SID), the Entrepreneurship Cell of the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, GA has developed an indigenous Drone Solution along with unique spray capability with the potential to improve spray efficiency multi-folds. The solution provides best-in-class spray reach and uniformity with unmatched droplets and flow-control. This combined with high reliability and indigenous manufacturing results in highly efficient and cost-effective solutions – removing the drudgery and inefficiencies of manual spraying.

“Future food security has become a major global concern and hence there is a movement towards making agriculture more sustainable with lesser use of harmful chemicals by making the input delivery process more efficient and precise. Many countries have moved to aerial spraying practices which are highly efficient and also reduce the hazardous impact of manual spraying. GA is at the forefront of drone-based agriculture technologies and has indigenously developed and validated a world-class solution to improve input application efficiency multi-fold. We believe that agriculture in many countries including India, is ready to use such cost-effective technologies to improve the yield – which will benefit the farmers and humanity at large,” said Abhishek Burman CEO and co-founder of GA.

“GA’s indigenous solution based on strong internal R&D can immensely benefit all the ecosystem partners in the field of agriculture in India. GA’s successful trials with many partners demonstrate that the solutions are world-class. We see the market potential to be huge as Governments across the world are moving at speed to clear regulations for the use of drones. We see great potential in “Team GA” and we are thrilled to be partnering with them,” said Parthasarathy N.S.