Our Seed Investment in Nabhdrishti Aerospace: Propelling India’s Defense Self-Reliance

We’re thrilled to announce Accel’s investment in Nabhdrishti Aerospace, a company developing micro gas turbine engines for defense and distributed power generation applications. Micro gas turbines are compact, high-speed jet engines that generate power efficiently, making them ideal for drones, UAVs and decentralized energy systems.

India’s journey in gas turbine engines dates back to the 1980s with the Kaveri engine project, an ambitious effort to develop a fighter jet engine for indigenous aircrafts. A notable byproduct of this program was the development of a highly capable ecosystem of engineers, researchers and manufacturers, all driven by the shared goal of building powerful gas turbine engines in India. The founders of Nabhdrishti - Rohit, Arjun and Antanu - are a product of this very ecosystem that took birth four decades ago. Having spent the last two decades designing and building commercial-grade gas turbine engines at leading global manufacturers such as Rolls Royce, GE and within the Kaveri program at GTRE, they bring deep technical expertise and a clear understanding of what it takes to realize these engines at scale.

The past decade has seen a material shift in India’s defense landscape, driven by government policy changes that emphasize domestic production and procurement as strategic imperatives. Programs like Make in India underscore an aggressive push to develop domestic capabilities in critical military technologies. Among them, aerial platforms such as drones and UAVs, which have become central to defense modernization, require powerful, adaptable propulsion units - this is the precise opportunity that Nabhdrishti is addressing. Additionally, the fuel-flexible design of Nabhdrishti’s engines presents opportunities beyond defense, with the potential to strengthen distributed power generation value chains and accelerate the transition to greener, more sustainable fuels.

Our investment in Nabhdrishti reflects Accel’s continued, long-term conviction in IP-driven companies building globally competitive products from India. Rohit, Arjun and Antanu represent a class of founders with the courage and skill to take on challenging problems of national importance, and we are excited to be early partners in their mission to shape the future of high-performance propulsion and power generation.