The Story
Beijan has raised ₹1.7 crore in a pre-seed round led by ajvc, the day-zero fund run by Aviral Bhatnagar. Its founders are the youngest in the fund's portfolio, and both are still undergraduates.
Naman Kasliwal and Shiv Patil started the company in 2025 while studying at BITS Pilani's Hyderabad campus, where it still operates from the CORAS Lab. It builds modules that add autonomy to defence equipment the Indian Armed Forces already own, rather than asking them to buy new platforms.
The Beijan Autonomous Navigation Module is a plug-and-play board that attaches to a drone and provides edge computing and navigation using onboard vision when satellite positioning is unavailable. The Autonomous Artillery Positioning System applies computer-vision-assisted ballistics, positioning and motorised actuation to legacy field guns, cutting the time needed to shift between targets. The company is also building DOOAF for ground-station fire correction, and secure mesh networking so battlefield assets can communicate without depending on infrastructure that can be disrupted.
The traction is further along than the round size suggests. Beijan's Prachand swarm ground station software is deployed with formations under the Indian Army's Southern Command, with further applications developed for Army Air Defence. Its navigation module has received letters of intent from eight military units. It has secured a ₹20 lakh order for the artillery automation system and a ₹25 lakh grant through the Curiosity programme, and has run pilots at the Pokhran field firing range, Secunderabad and Leh, including a week-long deployment with an Army camp near Jaisalmer.
The company traces back to the ISRO Robotics Challenge, where the two built a low-cost visual navigation system that reached the final. That work drew the attention of defence officials, leading to an invitation to Pokhran and collaboration with the Army Design Bureau on a ground station for drone swarms.
"Pitching was an uphill battle until we met ajvc," Kasliwal wrote in announcing the round, describing the fund as having focused on battlefield reality and technical clarity rather than process.
Why It Matters
The commercial insight here is not the technology. It is what Beijan is asking the Army to buy.
Selling a new platform to the Indian military is a decade-long undertaking. It means a capital acquisition programme, trials against competing systems, staff qualitative requirements, negotiation, and a procurement process that has defeated far larger companies than this one. Selling a module that upgrades equipment the Army already owns is a different transaction entirely. The gun exists. The drone exists. The budget line is smaller, the approval sits lower down, and the risk to the officer signing it is modest because nothing is being replaced.
That is why a company founded last year by two students has kit in the field. They are not competing for a platform contract. They are offering to make existing platforms better for a fraction of what a new one costs, which is a proposition a formation commander can act on rather than a proposal that goes to a ministry.
The problem they picked is also the right one. Satellite navigation has become unreliable in contested environments, because jamming and spoofing are now routine rather than exotic. A drone that depends on a GPS signal is a drone that stops working precisely when it is needed. Navigation that relies on what the aircraft can see rather than what it can receive removes that dependency, and it is one of the most actively pursued problems in defence technology worldwide.
Artillery automation is the less glamorous half and possibly the more valuable. India operates a great deal of legacy field artillery, and the time taken to reposition a gun between targets is a direct measure of how exposed its crew is to counter-battery fire. Reducing that time through motorised actuation and computer-vision-assisted positioning does not require replacing the gun, which is the whole point.
And the origin story explains the access. Two students entered the ISRO Robotics Challenge, built a low-cost visual navigation system, reached the final, and were noticed by a defence officer. The invitation to Pokhran followed, then work with the Army Design Bureau. That sequence is not something a pitch deck produces. It is what happens when someone solves a hard problem in public and the right person is watching.
The Strategic Read
The distance between where this company is operationally and where it is financially is the thing to watch.
Eight letters of intent, a deployed software product, a ₹20 lakh order and field pilots across three locations is a remarkable position for a company founded last year by undergraduates. It is also worth being precise about what those things are. A letter of intent is a statement of interest, not a purchase order. A ₹20 lakh MVP order is a trial, not a programme. Defence procurement in India moves on budget cycles measured in years, and the gap between a unit wanting something and a contract being signed and paid is routinely eighteen months to three years. Beijan has the hardest part, which is military interest, and not yet the part that pays salaries.
Against that, ₹1.7 crore is around $180,000. It funds prototypes, more field trials and a small team. It does not fund the working capital to manufacture and deliver at any scale, and it does not fund the two or three years of waiting that Indian defence contracting can require. Another round is not optional here, and its timing will be set by procurement calendars the company does not control.
The second issue is institutional rather than technical. Defence contracting is a compliance discipline: industrial licensing, security protocols, classified handling, audit trails, and the ability to satisfy procurement officers that a supplier will still exist in five years. Those are organisational capabilities, and they are the part a university lab does not teach. Two founders still completing degrees will need to build a company around the technology that looks credible to a buyer whose main concern is reliability over decades.
The competitive picture is also thickening. India's defence technology sector has attracted substantial capital over the past two years, and the well-funded players in autonomy and counter-UAS have balance sheets, retired officers on the payroll and lobbying capacity that a campus lab does not. Beijan's protection is that it is not competing for the same contracts. A retrofit module bought as an accessory is a different procurement route from a new platform, and that route has fewer incumbents on it.
What genuinely distinguishes this company is that it has been to the field. Pokhran, Leh, a week at a camp near Jaisalmer. Defence hardware fails in ways that laboratories do not reveal: dust, altitude, heat, vibration, soldiers using equipment in ways designers did not imagine. A startup that has taken its kit into those conditions before raising money has retired a category of risk that most defence startups carry into their Series A.
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