Affordable drones have become one of the defining weapons of modern warfare, and stopping them has now become a substantial problem: a rogue quadcopter costing a few hundred dollars can threaten a base, a border post or a power plant.
Armory, a Gurugram-based startup founded in 2024, builds the systems meant to counter them — detecting, tracking and neutralising hostile drones.
The company was founded by Amardeep Singh, an aerospace engineer by profession, to relieve his frustrations about the fact that India's defence hardware had lagged even as its software industry conquered global markets, leaving frontline forces reliant on imports or ageing kit.
Armory's operating principle, which the founder repeats often, was to build hardware at the speed of software.
By its own account it did: its counter-drone system went from a paper prototype to field trials with Army regiments in six months— a pace almost unheard of in defence procurement, where timelines are usually measured in years.
