neel mehta and nihar vartak founded asteria aerospace over 10 years ago with the idea of developing drones for defence applications the two developed and sold drones to the indian military paramilitary and state police forces who used the services for surveillance and reconnaissance purposesthe liberalisation of drone rules in 2021 encouraged the two to become more ambitious last year asteria launched a cloudbased drone operations and analytics platform called skydeck which helps to streamline the delivery of droneasaservice solutions for diverse applications two of asterias drones are now dgca type certified making them compliant for drone operations in indiaasteria has ip across the drone tech stack hardware software and analytics we design and manufacture multiple drone platforms ranging from 2 kg to 25 kg they are easy to use they are rugged and performance driven says neel their drones he says can be used across industrial applications such as surveillance and security land surveys agricultural surveys as well as inspection of critical assets like pipelines powerlines and telecom towers skydeck helps in seamlessly managing the planning and execution of drone flights data processing visualisation and analytics to provide business insights from drone data it enables aibased analysis of drone data ensuring easier and faster decisionmaking he saystoday asteria has a team of over 300 people out of which more than 60 are in rd in 2019 reliance industries arm jio platforms acquired a majority stake in asteriamehta says there are lots of opportunities to innovate in drone solutions using emerging technologies such as 5g ai edgecloud computing fuel cells and advanced sensors