WOW STORY OF THE DAY: Three BITS Pilani Graduates Built a Drone That Flies Twice as High as a Rafale and Costs a Fraction of a Satellite.

Ahmad Faraaz, Sashakt Tripathi, and Harshit Awasthi founded Kalam Labs at BITS Pilani in 2018, beginning as a space edtech platform before pivoting to stratospheric defence drones. Backed by Y Combinator, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Aman Gupta of Shark Tank India, the startup's UAVs are deployed at Pokhran and the Indo-China Line of Control, and hold a world altitude record recognised by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

A Space Metaverse, a Hrithik Roshan Film, and a Pivot That Changed Everything

• Ahmad Faraaz, Sashakt Tripathi, and Harshit Awasthi founded Kalam Labs in 2018 while studying at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. Their beginning was unexpected. The startup launched as a gamified space education platform, a multiplayer metaverse where children joined as gaming characters to explore the solar system with space instructors. In its first four months, the platform generated approximately ₹2 crore in revenue, secured backing from Y Combinator, and raised $2 million in funding. The trio also collaborated on a technical contribution to the aerial action film Fighter, featuring Hrithik Roshan.
• But the founders' ambitions were pulling them toward something larger. The pivot came when Awasthi told Faraaz about the Kármán line, the boundary 100 kilometres above Earth where the atmosphere thins to the point where a UAV would need orbital velocity rather than wings to stay airborne. That conversation about the edge of space became the founding insight of the company as it exists today.
• They made the decision to abandon a profitable edtech business and build stratospheric drones from the ground up. From a Lucknow-based manufacturing facility, with a 15-member aerospace team, Kalam Labs began building unmanned aerial vehicles designed to operate in the near-space zone that no one else in India was targeting.

Fly Where Nobody Can Follow

• The technical insight that drives Kalam Labs is as elegant as it is strategically powerful: a drone that operates at 100,000 feet is beyond the reach of conventional interception, immune to radar jamming, and capable of persistent surveillance across vast areas, at a cost that is approximately one-tenth of competing solutions.
• The breakthrough moment came in March 2025 when Kalam Labs completed its first operational mission with the India Meteorological Department. The IMD had been losing weather monitoring modules with every balloon launch because balloons cannot be brought back down. Kalam Labs attached its UAV to the balloon alongside the weather module. When the balloon detached at 30,000 metres, the UAV recorded the data and glided back to Earth autonomously, recovering the module intact.
• That altitude, 30,000 metres, is twice the maximum operational height of a Rafale fighter jet. The Indian Army took notice. Kalam Labs' drones are now deployed at Pokhran, India's nuclear test site, and along the Indo-China Line of Control. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics recognised Kalam Labs for achieving the world's highest UAV flight, at 9,790 metres above sea level in the Himalayas, navigating temperatures of minus 60 degrees Celsius, winds exceeding 50 kilometres per hour, and a 73 percent drop in atmospheric pressure, landing with sub-metre accuracy.

Scale, Numbers and Real-World Impact

Kalam Labs has completed over 60 launches, filed a patent, and is executing a ₹1 crore order with potential defence procurement expected to begin at ₹150 crore. The startup appeared on Shark Tank India Season 5 Episode 3, asking for ₹2 crore for 0.67% equity at a ₹300 crore valuation. Aman Gupta of boAt invested in the company. Investors include Y Combinator, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and the company has publicly disclosed a $450,000 pre-seed round. Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal is in talks to invest $1 million. Key platforms include the Stratospheric ISR UAV for surveillance, the Stratospheric Retrievable Radiosonde for weather monitoring, and the Stratospheric Kamikaze UAV Swarm currently in final testing. A supersonic ramjet-based UAV capable of Mach 2.5 is in development.

The Greatest Opportunities Live in the Spaces Nobody Else Is Looking At

• The sharpest lesson from Kalam Labs is this: the most transformative breakthroughs happen in the zones that existing players consider impractical.
• ⁠The stratosphere was empty precisely because everyone assumed it was too difficult. Conventional drone companies stayed low. Satellite companies stayed high. The zone between them was a gap that the entire global aerospace industry had, for decades, largely left open.
• ⁠Three students from BITS Pilani looked at that gap and asked: what if that is exactly where we build?
• ⁠"Deep, indigenous technology can shape the future of any nation," the founders said during their Shark Tank pitch. They named their company after APJ Abdul Kalam, India's greatest aerospace visionary and the Missile Man of India. And they are building, one stratospheric mission at a time, the kind of technology he spent his life believing India could produce.
• ⁠From a dorm room to Pokhran. From a space metaverse to the world altitude record. Kalam Labs is proving that India's next frontier is not below the clouds. It is above them.

Sources: YourStory, BusinessToday, Indian Startup News, Indian Television, Fly Eye / Kalam Labs Official