Didi & the rise of dronepreneurs

Agri drone and skilling startup AVPL is betting big on DaaS (drone as a service) to uplift agriculture, arm farmers with drones, and create village entrepreneurs. Can Sandhuu's gambit pay off?

By Rajiv Singh Forbes India Staff

Published: Aug 21, 2024 02:40:15 PM IST

Updated: Nov 25, 2024 10:32:02 AM IST

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Preet Sandhuu, Co-founder and Chairman, AVPL International. Image: Amit Verma

Hisar, Haryana. Jyoti Malik was born an ‘idealistic’ person. She wanted to fly high, be independent—financially and emotionally—and start her venture. Schooling in Mumbai gave her wings, college from Chandigarh raised her hopes, and her determination to make it big stoked her passion. But then came a cruel twist. After graduating in 2018, the young woman from Haryana had to opt out of the job market due to personal reasons. Once she returned after two years, she couldn’t land a job.

Unfortunately, there was another big wrench in the offing. Malik got married, settled in Hisar, some 250 km from Chandigarh, and her dreams of leading an ‘independent’ life were shattered. “I was grounded,” recalls Malik, who continued as a homemaker till late last year. “This was the realistic picture of my life,” she rues.

Almost at the same time, a bunch of VCs (venture capitalists) were hurling ‘realistic’ questions at a first-time entrepreneur. “Give us a realistic picture of your projections,” underlined one of the funders. For three fiscal years, starting FY20, the revenues of AVPL had stagnated around Rs 11 crore. “Don’t give us an exaggerated picture. We know our math,” the VC howled, reacting to the ‘absurd’ projection for FY23, which was double what the startup posted last year.

The person on the line of fire was Preet Sandhuu, another young woman from Chandigarh who too wanted to fly high during her college years and was inspired by Indian-born American astronaut Kalpana Chawla. The science grad from Khalsa College in Amritsar was fascinated with rockets and all that went behind and inside the rocket at Nasa. In 2016, Sandhuu founded AVPL as a skilling venture for college graduates, which eventually pivoted into an agri-drone startup by 2022. A year later, the bootstrapped founder was scouting for funding. “I was fighting a losing battle,” she recounts.

There were no takers for the startup. AVPL in its new avatar offered drone-as-a-service (DaaS), manufactured drones, and operated agri-input retail outlets. It also conducted DGCA-approved remote pilot certificate and agriculture spray courses. The big question for the VCs, however, was: Can the venture scale? Can drones make the venture fly?

Sandhuu, for her, part was convinced. “We wanted to foster entrepreneurship and create village-level entrepreneurs,” she underlines. The founder’s mission was sounding ‘idealistic’ to the potential backers, but Sandhuu knew she harboured a ‘realistic’ ambition.

Also read: Agritech investors: Not for the faint hearted

Sandhuu explains the reason for her optimism. In its formative years, AVPL got a realistic sense of what was going wrong with the skilling venture. “We used to train unemployed youth and equip them with essential skills for the job market in the cities,” she says. But there were two small problems. First, the socio-cultural background of the trainees made them misfits in the cities. Most of them would return to smaller towns and villages. Second, many faced problems in placement. There was a mismatch and sending skilled labour to the cities was not the right answer. So far, AVPL has taken a 40,000-feet view of the problem. Now it swooped down to 100 and 200 feet. “That’s when we realised why not create jobs across villages? Why to move to cities,” she says. “Can there be tools to create job opportunities in Bharat,” she wondered.

Drone turned out to be one of the most potent tools. She explains. Traditional forms of agriculture needed an upgrade, and precision agriculture was the answer. “Equipped with advanced sensors, drones can monitor crop health, assess soil conditions, and optimise irrigation patterns,” underlines Sandhuu, who started offering remote pilot certificate and agriculture spray courses for rural youth. “We wanted to empower a new generation of ‘dronepreneurs’ who could harness the potential of drones,” she adds.

Back in November 2023, the country was about to harness and empower rural women with a first-of-its-kind programme. The central government rolled out ‘Namo Drone Didi’ scheme, which was aimed at empowering women members of self-help groups (SHGs) by equipping them with drones at a subsidised rate. The plan entailed a subsidy of 80 percent of the drone cost or a maximum of Rs 8 lakh to women SHGs to purchase drones for commercial purposes. The plan also included training women as pilots so that they could provide drone rental services to farmers for spraying pesticides or fertiliser.

Drones were set to fly across Bharat and Sandhuu spotted a golden opportunity. The entrepreneur doubled down on drone training, expanded infrastructure across Haryana, and expanded its footprint across 12 states. VIRAJ, the flagship agricultural drone of AVPL with a payload capacity of 10 litre of spray tank, was used for seed broadcasting, agrochemical spraying, and remote pilot training. The agri-drone startup also partnered with IFFCO to spray pesticides on over 50 lakh acres across 70 districts in eight states.

The opportunities, interestingly, sprung beyond India. In July this year, AVP, tied up with NSDC International and a clutch of other organisations in Australia, the Netherlands, and the US for global certification training and courses. An uptick in drone skilling and training boosted the revenue of the startup from Rs 11.23 crore in FY20 to Rs 41.14 crore in FY24. The startup, interestingly, is now striking a revenue run-rate of Rs 200 crore for FY25, and has ambitious plans to double the numbers in the next fiscal. Realistic? Sandhuu sounds confident of meeting the target. “We know we can fly high,” she says.

The challenge, though, for the drone founder would be to add more user cases for drones. “Agriculture is a massive opportunity. But it also presents a big challenge,” reckons Rajan Gahlot, assistant professor (department of commerce) in the University of Delhi. The training and skill programmes are subsidised or sponsored by the central government. “Any realignment in their priorities will hit all the drone training and manufacturing startups across the country,” he underlines. The second big challenge for AVPL would be the threat of too many players entering into the segment. “The low-entry barrier will attract many, and this segment might get cluttered,” he says.

Sandhuu, meanwhile, is confident of growing at a faster clip. “We have not even scratched the surface,” she says, adding that the target is to train and create at least 1.5 lakh village entrepreneurs in the short to medium term. Malik, from Hisar, happens to be one of them. She is now a drone pilot, runs her venture of offering drones as a service for agricultural purposes, and charges a handsome fee of Rs 300 per acre for spraying pesticides and fertiliser. “Now I am independent,” she smiles, adding that drones have given wings to women across India. ‘All of us will fly high,” signs off drone didi.