Industries that need to monitor large sites from above largely depend on satellite imagery. It can be costly to produce, while its resolution is often too low to provide the detail operators on the ground need.
Bengaluru-based Arctus Aerospace is building unmanned aircraft to fill this gap. Designed to fly in the stratosphere for 24 hours, the aircraft will carry optical, infrared, electro-optical, and synthetic aperture radar cameras to capture high-resolution video of specific sites.
Shreepoorna S Rao founded Arctus in 2024, straight out of IIT Madras, where he completed a B.Tech in civil engineering. He started the company after noticing India's reliance on foreign platforms for persistent high-altitude aerial monitoring.
An aircraft built from raw material
The aircraft is designed to weigh 1-1.2 tonnes, with a 20-metre wingspan, a payload of 250-300 kg, and a cruising altitude of about 50,000 feet. Arctus develops the landing gear, brakes, hydraulics, power systems, avionics, flight computer, and autonomy software, with semiconductors being the exception.
The work takes place at a 25,000 sq ft facility in Bengaluru, where carbon fibre fabric and blocks of titanium and aluminium arrive as raw material. The facility handles layup, machining, PCB manufacturing and assembly, as well as firmware and sensor development. Components are designed for 100,000 take-offs and landings, while the landing gear is tested on an in-house rig.
So far, Arctus has flown smaller demonstrator aircraft rather than the full-size platform. These have completed more than 1,000 flights and 10,000 flight hours at altitudes between 10,000 and 30,000 feet, capturing more than 10,000 sq km of video data.
The flights have also generated data to train the company's autonomy software. The demonstrators recorded aircraft behaviour in crosswinds and rain, along with sensor performance. Arctus used this proprietary data to train its autonomy stack, which combines reinforcement learning and regression models.
The onboard autonomy system is built entirely in-house. Its current capabilities include fully autonomous path planning, obstacle avoidance, air traffic management, GPS-denied navigation and weather-agnostic flight planning.
For a mission, an operator at a ground control station enters the type of image, spectrum and duration required. The software plans the route, captures the imagery, and returns and lands the aircraft. Most test flights take off from a DRDO facility in Chitradurga.
Selling data, not aircraft
Arctus plans to operate the aircraft itself and sell the data as a service. Customers will receive the data through a dashboard without having to handle the hardware.
Pricing varies depending on whether a customer needs a still image or video, and whether it is required during the flight or later. The company uses about $5 per sq km as a reference point.
The data remains on the aircraft and on an offline server rack at the Bengaluru facility, which is not connected to the public internet. Arctus then transfers it to the customer's own systems.
Oil and gas, mining, and agriculture are the first industries it is targeting, with insurance and port logistics planned about six months later. Rao says site-level data allows clients to check whether contractors are following standard operating procedures, lower insurance costs, and generate incident reports.
Arctus has run two paid pilots so far—one with a publicly listed PSU and another with an arm of the Karnataka government, which also awarded it the Elevate grant. The startup plans to convert these into annual subscriptions.
From demonstrators to production
Arctus has raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding, led by Version One Ventures, with participation from South Park Commons and gradCapital, alongside angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Srinivas Narayan, and the founding teams of Ather, Boom Supersonic and Bounce Infinity.
An earlier cheque of $100,000 from gradCapital and Emergent Ventures brings its total funding to $2.7 million. Most of the capital has gone into R&D and manufacturing capex, along with pilots.
The next step is a production-spec aircraft.
"We have been working with technology demonstrators till now, and the plan is to deploy this," Rao says.
Arctus has received inbound requests from the Middle East and Australia and is also targeting North America. It plans to deploy aircraft there, meet customers, and set up a base.
Arctus Aerospace is part of YourStory's Tech30 cohort—a showcase of India's most promising startups of 2026, unveiled at TechSparks Bengaluru.
Edited by Teja Lele