India’s Drone Killer: Can Armory Shield Indian Skies With Indigenous Tech?

The rules of modern warfare are being rewritten as we speak. Drones are now central to surveillance, reconnaissance, and even cross-border strikes, which is driving a surge in global demand for anti-drone systems. From military bases and refineries to airports and financial institutions, securing critical infrastructure against rogue drones has become a national priority.

India is well aware and equipped. Not to mention, India-made drones and counter-drone systems played a key role in Operation Sindoor, which was a precision counter-terror strike carried out by the Indian Armed Forces in response to the Pahalgam terror attack in April. 

The mission is also emblematic of the fact that vital indigenous counter-drone capabilities have become imperative for the security of the nation.

According to Motilal Oswal, India’s counter-drone market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 28% through 2029, as neutralising aerial threats becomes increasingly critical.

Gurugram-based defence tech startup Armory Shield wants to make the most of this opportunity when it comes to empowering the nations in the craft of high-tech warfare. 

Founded in 2024, Armory Shield is developing next-generation counter-UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) solutions tailored for the modern battlefield.

What’s interesting about the founder of this startup, Amardeep Singh, is that he has been working closely with and persuading government departments about the potential of such systems since 2008, when he joined ideaForge as a fresh graduate, and drones were barely on anyone’s radar.  

Over the next six years after joining ideaForge, he built its business development arm from the ground up. This gave him invaluable exposure, as he got an opportunity to work closely with the Indian armed forces and paramilitary units across sensitive regions, from the Pakistan and Bangladesh borders to Naxalite zones in Maharashtra and CRPF operations in insurgency-hit areas.

Singh was nurtured with deep insight into the vulnerabilities of modern warfare and a strong conviction that India needed to build its own defence tech ecosystem. 

However, this conviction had yet to meet validation. Years later, as cheap commercial drones began to be weaponised in Ukraine, Syria, and the Middle East, he saw a clear opportunity and launched Armory in 2024. 

Singh Returns To His Roots

Armory isn’t Singh’s first entrepreneurial venture. After IdeaForge, he cofounded Nextgear, a company that attempted to build an AI-powered alternative to GoPro. 

Singh’s next venture, Wizard, was a solo B2B SaaS play that offered personalised marketing videos at scale. He bootstrapped the business, built the product himself, and ran it for six years before realising it wasn’t enough to satiate his obsession to build impactful tech for national security.

“I realised my most meaningful work was still what we did at IdeaForge. I wanted to return to defence and hardware,” Singh said.

After helping shape India’s early defence drone landscape as a founding member at ideaForge, Singh returned to his roots. However, this time, he decided to neutralise drones instead of building them.

Therefore, Singh started building AI-powered counter-drone systems to counter modern asymmetric warfare, where small, cheap UAVs can wreak outsized havoc.

Building India’s Counter-UAS Solution

At the heart of Armory’s counter-drone strategy lies Surge — the startup’s flagship product capable of drone detection and soft kill capabilities. 

Designed to identify hostile drones from several miles away and neutralise them by jamming their signals, Surge is already being deployed in two variants — a manpack version operable by a single soldier, and a larger portable version suited for use by two to three personnel. 

But Surge is just the start. “Defeating drone-led wars is not a one-product problem. It requires multi-layered solutions. That’s why our long-term vision is to build a full suite of counter-UAS systems — both soft kill and eventually hard kill solutions,” Singh said.

He added that Surge’s mobility and intelligence give it an edge in real-world deployment, especially in Indian terrains. 

While many global anti-drone products are still built around standard drone frequencies like 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz, Surge has been designed to detect and jam non-standard, custom frequencies — the kind often used in real-life warfare and observed in recent conflicts. 

But jamming, while effective, has its limitations. 

One of the key issues is collateral jamming, where jamming enemy drones can also disrupt one’s own communications operating on similar frequencies. 

To address this, Armory is developing selective jamming strategies, including real-time packet analysis to identify and disrupt only drone-specific signals without affecting other communication channels. 

Moving on, complementing the hardware is Samaritan OS, Armory’s AI-powered command-and-control software that acts as a centralised operating layer across its ecosystem. 

Whether it’s Surge or any of the upcoming products in the pipeline, all of them will integrate into Samaritan OS, enabling real-time threat analysis, device orchestration, and adaptive decision-making. Simply put: Samaritan OS is the digital backbone of our defence stack.

Armory’s Core Competency

One of Armory’s core competencies is to be as self-reliant as possible. Design, software, and a significant part of manufacturing happen in-house or through Indian vendors. Only a handful of components, think semiconductors, are imported.

“The more external dependencies you have, the slower you move… and speed is the only advantage a startup has over bigger players,” Singh said. 

This decision also aligns with India’s Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, which aims to localise defence manufacturing and reduce reliance on foreign OEMs. Singh is bullish that startups like Armory can fill crucial gaps in India’s defence supply chain.

Since late 2024, Armory has been conducting extensive field trials with various wings of the Indian Armed Forces. Many of these tests were carried out in extreme summer conditions (above 45°C) to evaluate the system’s resilience in harsh environments. These field trials have proven invaluable, feeding directly into product development.

“Every time we ran a field trial, we learned something that helped us improve. That’s the advantage of being full-stack—you can apply those learnings immediately,” the founder said.  

As a result, SURGE, Armory’s flagship counter-drone system, has seen continuous refinement across its hardware, targeting algorithms, and jamming protocols.

What’s Ahead For Armory

While SURGE is already operational, Singh is clear-eyed about the next big challenge — scale. “Building a working prototype is only the first step. What really matters is whether you can deliver a few hundred systems when the country needs them — and fast,” he says. 

To that end, Armory is now focussed on ramping up production capacity, optimising its supply chains, streamlining testing protocols, and forecasting delivery timelines to ensure readiness for large-scale deployment.

The company is also bidding for several government tenders and expects its first commercial deployments by the end of this year. Armory is also preparing to introduce multiple configurations of SURGE, tailored to varying mission profiles and terrains.

Looking ahead, Singh sees the evolving threat landscape pushing the boundaries of counter-drone technology. The team is already investing in next-gen solutions, including hard-kill systems and countermeasures for autonomous drones. 

“We’re actively experimenting with technologies to neutralise such threats,” Singh said.

Over the next 18–24 months, Armory’s roadmap is sharply defined — scale production, diversify configurations, win real deployments, and invest in deep R&D.  

Amid all this, Singh remains grounded in the harsh realities of the defence tech market. Building in this space comes with its own set of challenges — long sales cycles, high regulatory scrutiny, and the sheer complexity of hardware R&D. 

“On paper, there are dozens of companies claiming to build counter-drone systems. But very few are doing the original work,” he said.

Many, he claims, are simply white-labelling foreign, often Chinese, solutions or reselling outdated systems built for standard frequencies like 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz. 

Adding to the complexity is the rise of counterfeit systems — low-grade imitations falsely branded as made-in-India solutions. These not only erode trust in the ecosystem but also introduce dangerous vulnerabilities on the battlefield, Singh cautioned.

However, what sets Armory apart, he added, is its first-principles engineering and its refusal to depend on foreign OEMs for mission-critical tech.  

Now, as India pushes to become self-reliant in defence manufacturing, Singh sees a historic opportunity for innovation in the sector. The government is encouraging homegrown defence startups like never before, and even VCs, traditionally shy about hardware, are now warming up to the space. 

As India doubles down on its defence innovation, can Armory rise to guard its frontlines with indigenous, resilient, and future-ready tech?

[Edited by: Shishir Parasher]