Started in 2019, TSAW Drones set out to capitalise on drone regulations that opened up a plethora of opportunities for startups in this field. “Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) approved around seven consortiums to test and use drones in the country and we started making white label offerings to three of those consortiums consisting of large companies,” says the company co-founder & CEO, Kishan Tiwari. “We started creating drones, deploying it for delivering medicines and transporting any package across a 10 km range.”
TSAW is in the process of setting up drone hubs and doing deliveries to these hubs. For the last mile, the company uses ground mobility like bikes to complete the delivery. “We have been doing this model for Tata 1mg in Kolkata to collect and deliver blood samples for tests. It is also sustainable as we can deploy electric drives throughout the route,” says Tiwari. Without drones, the time taken for samples to reach the lab is over six hours and the final report takes 12-18 hours to reach the patient, he points out. “With drones, we have reduced this transport time to two hours and the final report reaches the patient in roughly eight hours.”
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TSAW Drones has a route live in Nizamabad, Telangana as well. “We are gearing up to partner with ONDC to do deliveries in remote regions,” says Tiwari. With R&D at its core, Tiwari and team have come up with a software stack system called drone cloud intelligence system. “This stack allows us to create and follow paths, avoid obstacles and reroute drones and finally to monitor the health of the drone fleet.”
TSAW Drones designs its own drones and innovates in order to make flights more efficient and cost effective. “For a drone that can fly up to 10,000 feet altitude with a payload of 8 kg across 100 km range, having a wing span of four meters, we are able to produce it under Rs 7 lakh, whereas other drones can cost anywhere between Rs 15-18 lakh. We are in talks for a joint venture to manufacture these drones at scale so we have full control over the assembly line,” he adds.
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The drone startup has been able to reduce both capex and opex for its clients and charges them on a per flight basis. “We charge in single digits per kg load, per km distance for every flight. We will further bring it down by half in the coming years,” says Tiwari. TSAW Drones has been incubated by IIT Delhi. The startup has raised Rs 2.9 crore from Log9 Materials, Zypp Electric, Chandigarh Angel Network and We Founder Circle. “We want to be pioneers in building the different links in the drone ecosystem. Drones need AI, ML, semiconductor, hardware and even bio mimicry knowledge. We have been involved in this for eight years and positioned correctly to bring all these domains together for a healthy supply chain and ecosystem,” he adds.