With additional assistance from SIDBI and equity-free financing from the Ministry of Defence's Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) program, Tsalla Aerospace has raised $1 million in its first round of external funding, spearheaded by Sunny Stalnaker, executive VP at ASML.

Key Highlights

• Tsalla Aerospace raised $1 million in its maiden funding round to scale aerospace innovation.
• The funding will support Tsalla Aerospace’s expansion into India’s commercial space and aviation markets.

The money raised will be utilized to scale deployment for industrial and defense use cases and broaden its autonomous systems platform.

Tsalla Aerospace, which was established in 2019 and is housed at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), develops an AI-based autonomy stack for unmanned systems including drones. Its AI Pilot seeks to perform with no operator assistance and allows unmanned systems to function without GPS or communication support.

Tsalla collaborates on several projects with the Indian Army and Navy. These include logistics use cases including ship-to-ship distribution in inclement weather, confined-space reconnaissance systems, and backpack-based VTOL platforms intended for single-person operation.

Tsalla faces competition from international dual-use autonomy developers as well as domestic defense and autonomy firms including ideaForge, NewSpace Research & Tech, Sagar Defence, and CRON Systems.

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In order to expand its autonomy stack, increase deployments in India and other markets, and explore new defense and industrial sectors, the company also wants to fund $8 million in a seed round.