Ankit Mehta and ideaForge: How a Bootstrapped IIT Project Became India's Listed Drone Leader
From eight years without venture money to a 93% IPO pop, ideaForge built a defense-tech company by ignoring nearly every startup playbook. Here is how Ankit Mehta did it.
There is a room, somewhere inside every initial public offering, where language goes to die. Ankit Mehta has been in it. The co-founder and CEO of ideaForge describes IPO diligence not as paperwork but as an interrogation, one where the burden of proof falls on every adjective you have ever used about your own company.
Short of proving that we were actually alive, we had to prove everything else written on that paper. If your pitch contains any hyperbole, it goes out the window the day you decide to list.
The irony is hard to miss. Startups run on hyperbole; the whole funding machine is greased by the word “pioneer.” Here was a process that made you prove it or delete it. For a company doing hardware when nobody in India did hardware, and defense when nobody dreamed of it, that was just the final exam in a very long course.
We were doing hardware when nobody was talking about hardware in India. We were doing defense when nobody was dreaming of defense. And then we wanted to take on the challenge of going public in all of this.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The eight-year engine room
Before the public markets, there was the grind. Founded in 2007 by four IIT Bombay alumni, ideaForge was bootstrapped until 2015, with its first institutional check arriving only in 2017 from Qualcomm, when the company was still 35 to 50 people. The product was a drone, but the harder problem was getting anyone to use it.
A young boy with spiky hair would go around the country demonstrating the product. That was our only weapon.
Buyers, mostly defense and government agencies, would purchase an expensive drone and then lock it away. Ankit’s team had to teach them to fly it.
Don’t use it like party wear, use it like a uniform. You can’t patrol because you found a thief. Patrolling catches the thief in action.
The lesson, for anyone selling into rigid institutions: adoption is a harder engineering problem than the product itself. Total pre-IPO funding eventually reached $53.8 million across 16 rounds, including a $20 million Series B led by Florintree in 2022. But the behavior change came first.
The equity bet that broke the mold
Here Ankit’s thinking diverges most sharply from imported Silicon Valley orthodoxy. The standard four-year, equal-installment vesting schedule was built for companies that listed in five or six years. Hardware does not move that fast.
If you’re building deep tech, a standard four-year equal vest doesn’t work. You have to backload the equity, because the real value of the hardware is created in years four, five, and six.
ideaForge’s ESOP scheme leaned on this backloaded structure, evolving from chunky upfront grants in the bootstrapped years to compensation-linked bands later. Underneath it sat a simple reframe of what employees actually value.
An employee is interested in the net value of what they receive, not the number of shares or the price. Beyond a point, they’re not keen on that.
The same anti-orthodoxy shaped the most-watched decision of the IPO. Venture wisdom says hire a public-market CFO 18 to 24 months out. ideaForge elevated co-founder Vipul Joshi, a childhood friend of Ankit’s with a commerce background, not a finance-veteran resume.
Everyone tells you to hire a CFO who has taken companies public before. We did the exact opposite, because he understood our operations better than anyone.
The result was a sprint of under nine months from decision to listing, executed while restating financials from Indian GAAP to IndAS. Most companies endure a wholesale management overhaul before going public. ideaForge kept its core team and bet on internal trust.
The 93% day
In June 2023, the bet paid off in public. The IPO was oversubscribed 106 times, the first Indian listing since 2021 to clear 100x. The stock listed at ₹1,305.10 against an issue price of ₹672, a first-day premium of roughly 93%. But the number Ankit returns to is not the pop. It is who caught it.
Enough people captured a disproportionate amount of wealth compared to what they’d have made otherwise. Including people who helped us with logistics and on the shop floor.
This was the backloading thesis cashing out on a single trading day. Employees in their twenties and thirties, many granted options on tenure rather than title, saw years of low-cash patience convert into real money.
Validation of a different kind arrived in May 2025. During Operation Sindoor, ideaForge’s hybrid mini-UAVs were deployed by the Indian Armed Forces for intelligence and reconnaissance in contested, GPS-denied environments, followed in June by a roughly ₹137 crore emergency procurement order from the Army. The company, which holds an estimated 50% of the domestic UAV market, has since pushed into offensive systems: drones that find targets and coordinate with assets that neutralize them, all while surviving jamming and spoofing.
The more consciousness there is about your effort, the more people want to contribute to it. If that effort contributes to the nation, you see a lot of positive motion.
Hiring for “trustlessness”
When there are no peers to poach, you cannot hire for pedigree. Ankit’s filter for early talent is built from first principles, the experience of having failed, the desire to contribute, and a quality he calls trustlessness.
The most critical trait isn’t a resume or pedigree. It’s the ability to hold a vision and drive the next steps without needing to be told what to do.
It is the through-line of everything ideaForge has done: a refusal to inherit the playbook, whether on vesting, the CFO chair, or the resume. A company that once had to prove it was alive is now making a larger case, that India can build sovereign hardware, list it, and reward the people who bet early.
India has to become a product nation. We must stop accepting black boxes and take sovereign control of our technology. You cannot stay at the surface layer and hope to build something new.
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