Beijan raises $180,000 pre-seed as college founders land Army deployments
What's the deal? BeijanDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has raised ₹1.7 crore (roughly $180,000) in a pre-seed round led by ajvcDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the day-zero fund run by Aviral Bhatnagar. Its two founders, Naman Kasliwal and Shiv Patil, are undergraduates at BITS Pilani's Hyderabad campus, where the company still operates from the CORAS Lab.
What's the endgame? Beijan builds modules that add autonomy to defence equipment the Indian Armed Forces already own, rather than asking them to buy new platforms. Its navigation module is a plug-and-play board that gives drones edge computing and vision-based navigation when satellite positioning fails. A separate system applies computer-vision-assisted ballistics and motorised actuation to legacy field guns, cutting the time needed to shift between targets.
Why now? 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, and its navigation module has drawn letters of intent from eight military units.
By the numbers: The company has secured a ₹20 lakh order for its artillery automation system and a ₹25 lakh grant through the Curiosity programme. It has run pilots at the Pokhran field firing range, Secunderabad, and Leh, including a week-long deployment near Jaisalmer.
The company traces back to the ISRO Robotics Challenge, where the founders built a low-cost visual navigation system that reached the final. That work drew defence officials' attention, leading to work with the Army Design Bureau on a ground station for drone swarms.
What's the pitch? Selling a new platform to the Indian military can take a decade, running through capital acquisition programmes, trials, and ministry-level procurement. Selling a module that upgrades kit the Army already owns is a smaller transaction, with a lower approval level and less risk for the officer signing off. That is how two students have hardware in the field.
What could go wrong? Early orders and grants remain small relative to full platform contracts, and defence procurement can stall even for upgrades. "Pitching was an uphill battle until we met ajvc," Kasliwal wrote, describing the fund as focused on battlefield reality over process.
The signal: The bet is on relevance, not scale. Satellite navigation has become unreliable as jamming and spoofing turn routine, making vision-based navigation one of the most pursued problems in defence technology worldwide. By upgrading legacy artillery and drones instead of replacing them, Beijan is targeting budget lines a formation commander can act on — a route that has let a company founded in 2025 skip past the procurement gridlock that stalls larger firms.
Read more: startupfox.in
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
