With Garuda Robotics, drones aren’t killing machines – they’re killer apps

Popular culture and news media have inculcated the masses with the image of drones as weapons of war. Depending on who you ask, they’re either tools against harmful terrorist elements or violators of national sovereignty.

But instead of dropping bombs, Garuda Robotics‘ drones will drop food, parcels, and medical supplies. The Singapore and Palo Alto based startup, founded by 20-year-old Pulkit Jaiswal, aims to provide drones-as-a-service to governments, large corporations, and first responders. Pulkit took the stage to pitch at Tech in Asia’s Startup Asia Jakarta 2013 conference.

“Sure, drones have a negative connotation… but we want to slowly turn drones into tangible products that the public can gradually get used to and accept,” says Pulkit.

Garuda is already in talks with potential clients to conduct trials. While a wide range of applications are possible, the company is zoning in on a few: surveillance of oil and gas infrastructure, search and rescue operations, and support for civil defense operations.

It has a full-stack solution in place involving both hardware and software. Besides building customizable drone fleets consisting of tiny nano-robots that can fit into the palm of a hand to larger quadcopters that are 15 inches wide, Garuda provides customers with a cloud app to manage their drone fleets and even a visual interface to program drone behavior.

These robots are autonomous: once the programming is done, they can be counted on to navigate the terrain, avoid collisions, and even stay out of forbidden areas.

Garuda’s services are available for a six-figure price and a monthly or yearly subscription fee. The platform will also allow developers to create add-ons that extend the basic functionality supplied by the company.

Pushing the startup’s technology will be a network of “forward-deployed engineers” — taking a leaf from CIA-funded big data firm Palantir Technologies — that can serve as a sounding board for potential customers and attempt to create solutions specially tailored for them.

Fronting Garuda is a solid team of drone enthusiasts and engineers that include Billy Clary, founder of GotAerial, a company that does aerial camera work using drones, and Mathur Vinjamury, a specialist in scalable cloud solutions with seven years of experience in IBM.

Born and raised in New Delhi, India, Pulkit moved to Singapore to study computer engineering as an undergraduate at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore through a scholarship. However, he quit school two years in to work on his interests in drones and entrepreneurship. He says:

I did not find academic life fascinating…it’s too structured and you’ve got to follow tenets or rules. University is great for someone who wants to be an engineer but not an entrepreneur.

Pulkit later transferred to Stanford for four months before starting e-commerce site Swapidy, which was profitable and generated tens of thousands in revenue a month. After committing to working full-time on the project, he became a finalist for the Thiel Fellowship program where students are given money to drop out of school and work on startup ideas.