1820sThe British record only the land they tax. Once the administration had a firm foothold it surveyed cultivated land, because that is what generated revenue, and left the residential heart of every village unrecorded. Two centuries on, roughly 70 per cent of rural India cannot prove it owns the ground its house stands on. Vipul puts 60 to 70 per cent of civil court cases in that gap, settled by a single patwari.
2016One pizza grounds the sector. A founder flew a drone delivering pizza over Mumbai as a marketing gimmick, and commercial drones were banned for three years. Whatever survived faced about 25 separate approvals.
2016-19The cockroach years, and an association. Investors read AEREO as a science project while t-shirt, e-commerce and food-tech companies raised easily, and follow-on rounds went sideways because nobody funds a sector the state has closed. 3one4 Capital and StartupXseed stayed in. Four or five drone founders walked out of a Delhi policy meeting, stopped complaining to each other and registered the Drone Federation of India.
2018Hardware stops being the answer. Until 2017 the company had pushed hardware capability on angel and seed money. In 2018 the founders decided a problem of this size has to be attacked from the problem end, which is where the self-description as a business insight company empowered by drones comes from.
2019The state changes its mind. The topmost offices in government, which had not been invested in drones, ran their own analysis across what Vipul calls the 2018-19 period and concluded the threat was real but small against the opportunity. The word went out that the policy would change.
Jan 2020SVAMITVA starts, and COVID does not stop it. The decision to map the residential land of all 660,000 villages landed just as the pandemic did, and nobody halted: crews were in the fields with drones up through the peak, slowed only by the difficulty of moving people.
Aug 2021The Drone Rules are rewritten. Twenty-five permissions collapse into five, 90 per cent of Indian airspace becomes green zone, and a production incentive of about 20 per cent arrives. The sector goes from a few tens of companies to more than 200.
Today200,000 villages done, about 40,000 of them AEREO's. A village costs roughly 6,000 rupees against 20,000 and four to five days by hand, and one crew covers five in a day at 2.5 to 3 cm resolution. AEREO has been profitable for three years at around 250 per cent growth, went from 50 to 450 people in eighteen months, and cut import dependency from 70 per cent to 40. Problems the government had worked on for two decades were half-solved in under two years.
