New Delhi, 23rd September 2025: Venture Catalysts, India’s premier early-stage investor and integrated incubator, has led an a Rs 3.5 Cr pre-seed round in Paar Autonomy, a next-generation robotics startup developing perception hardware and agentic artificial intelligence for unmanned aerial, ground, and sea vehicles deployed in defence, policing, and industrial inspection. Previously the startup has raised an angel round with participation of two pioneers of the Indian drone industry who, between them, bring more than a dozen years of operational and regulatory experience to the company in an angel capacity.
Founded in 2024 by robotics engineer Vignesh Jayaraman who previously served as the head of product at one India’s premier drone startups, Paar Autonomy builds multi-sensor, gyro-stabilised gimbal cameras that give drones and rovers “super-human” sight, and couples them with proprietary agentic AI models that allow machines to interpret complex environments, coordinate with human operators and collaborate in real time. The company’s first products will address the global defence market for perception and autonomy solutions in unmanned vehicles, estimated at US $6 billion for drones alone, with ground and maritime robots projected to add a further US $4-5 billion by 2030.
Commenting on the investment, Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Co-Founder and MD of Venture Catalysts, said, “A sovereign nation can only be as secure as the intelligence that protects its borders and critical infrastructure. Paar Autonomy is building that intelligence at the edge, fusing multi-sensor perception with decision-making AI so that unmanned assets can navigate, detect and respond faster than any adversary and farther than any human eye. What excites us is the dual-use potential of the technology: the same gimbal that spots a threat at the Line of Control can also inspect a railway bridge or offshore pipeline at one-tenth the cost and without risking a single life. Investing at the pre-seed stage allows Venture Catalysts to guide Paar Autonomy from lab to field, ensure that its IP remains proudly ‘Made in India’, and position the company as a global benchmark for affordable, combat-ready autonomy.”
Vignesh Jayaraman, Founder and CEO of Paar Autonomy, said, “My goal was to push the frontier of what unmanned systems could perceive and do autonomously in the wild. This funding from Venture Catalysts is more than capital; it is a vote of confidence that enables us to commission our first manufacturing line, ship pilot units to defence and PSU customers, and recruit top-tier talent in perception engineering, embedded AI and business development. With the guidance of industry veterans who have already built successful drone platforms, we plan to deliver products that not only serve India’s strategic needs but also compete on the world stage.”
The investment is in line with Venture Catalysts’ strategy of backing deep-tech founders addressing large, underserved markets with hardware-software convergence. Paar Autonomy’s roadmap includes direct collaborations with defence establishments, public-sector undertakings and international OEMs, supplying both turnkey gimballed payloads and licensable AI models that can retrofit existing fleets of UAVs (drones), UGVs (rovers) and USVs (unmanned boats). This latest addition to the Venture Catalysts portfolio reflects the firm’s continued commitment to strengthening India’s indigenous capabilities in critical technologies such as robotics, aerospace and advanced manufacturing.
