Tsalla Aerospace raises $1 Mn in maiden funding round

Tsalla Aerospace has raised $1 million in its first external funding round led by Sunny Stalnaker, executive VP at ASML, with additional support from SIDBI and equity-free grants from the Ministry of Defence’s Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) programme. 

The proceeds will be used to expand its autonomous systems platform and scale deployment for defence and industrial use cases.

Founded in 2019 and incubated at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Tsalla Aerospace builds an AI-based autonomy stack for drones and unmanned systems. Its AI Pilot enables unmanned platforms to operate without GPS or communication support and aims to function with zero operator intervention.

Tsalla works with the Indian Navy and Indian Army on multiple projects. These include confined-space reconnaissance systems, backpack-based VTOL platforms designed for single-person operation, and logistics use cases such as ship-to-ship delivery in difficult weather conditions.

Tsalla competes with domestic defence and autonomy companies such as ideaForge, NewSpace Research & Tech, Sagar Defence, CRON Systems, and global dual-use autonomy developers.

According to the company, it also plans to raise $8 million in a seed round to expand its autonomy stack, grow deployments in India and international markets, and enter new defence and industrial segments.