Mela Ventures leads funding for startups
Bangalore’s General Aeronautics (GA), a specialist in Drones for precision agriculture, said Rs.65 million from pre-series A financing is for expanding its go-to market programs and continue investment in the areas of high reliability and efficient spraying, operational support including training Drone Pilots.
The fund raising was led by Mela Ventures Trust of Bangalore, a SEBI-approved AIF Category-2 fund for the early stage companies.
GA was started by India’s acclaimed aircraft designer Dr. Kota Harinarayana and Abhishek Burman along with Dr. Anutosh Moitra & Air Cmde P K Choudhary (Retd.) to bring the best of the aircraft design practices to the field of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle systems and provide efficient, reliable and cost-effective drone systems to address agricultural and other societal needs.
Incubated at the Society for Innovation and Development (SID), the Entrepreneurship Cell of Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, GA has developed indigenous Drone Solution along with unique spray capability with a potential to improve spray efficiency multi-folds. The solution provides best-in-class spray reach and uniformity with unmatched droplet and flow-control. This combined with high reliability and indigenous manufacturing results in highly efficient and cost-effective solutions – removing the drudgery and inefficiencies of manual spraying.
“Future food security has become a major global concern and hence there is a movement towards making agriculture more sustainable with lesser use of harmful chemicals by making the input delivery process more efficient and precise. Many countries have moved to aerial spraying practices which is highly efficient and also reduces the hazardous impact of manual spraying,” Abhishek Burman CEO and co-founder of GA said on 21 Jan 2021, announcing the pre-series A funding.
GA is in the forefront of drone-based agriculture technologies and has indigenously developed and validated a world-class solution to improve input application efficiency multi-fold. We believe that agriculture in many countries including India, is ready to use such cost-effective technologies to improve the yield – which will benefit the farmers and humanity at large,” said Abhishek Burman CEO and co-founder of GA.
“GA’s indigenous solution based on strong internal R&D can immensely benefit all the ecosystem partners in the field of agriculture in India. GA’s successful trials with many partners demonstrates that the solutions are world-class. We see the market potential to be huge as the Governments across the world are moving at speed to clear regulations for the use of drones. We see a great potential in “Team GA” and we are thrilled to be partnering with them,” said Mela Ventures Managing Partner Parthasarathy N.S.
In conjunction with the investment round, Parthasarathy will be joining GA’s board of directors.
With a goal to build next-gen entrepreneurs, the fund focuses on building a portfolio in areas, such as AI/ML, AR/VR, IoT, Cloud Migration and Deep Technologies. Mela Ventures was founded by Industry veterans, Krishnakumar Natarajan and Parthasarathy NS who have co-founded Mindtree and taken it from a startup to a multi-billion-dollar market cap enterprise. #technology #drones #defence #makeinIndia #banking #funds /fiinews.com
