India is no longer experimenting with defence technology—it is preparing to industrialise it.That is the clearest signal from Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s Union Budget for 2026, even though defence startups were not explicitly name-checked in the announcement. For a small but growing cohort of companies building sensors, electronics, propulsion systems and space-linked intelligence tools, the message arrives not in what was said, but in the architecture beneath it.The Budget’s emphasis on domestic manufacturing, critical minerals, electronics and semiconductor supply chains—alongside a sharp rise in capital expenditure for defence and national security technology—reflects a policy shift from episodic procurement toward long-horizon capability building.That shift arrives as India’s defence-tech ecosystem enters a more selective phase. The sector has attracted $711 million in cumulative equity funding since inception, according to industry data. To put that in perspective, Israel’s defence-tech sector, operating in an economy one-tenth the size of India’s, draws nearly double that amount annually. More telling, Indian capital is increasingly concentrated in a handful of platform-oriented companies rather than spread thinly across speculative ventures, a sign of maturation but also of a narrow path to scale.From allocation to executionFor companies like EON Space Labs, which designs electro-optical and infrared imaging payloads—specialised cameras… Read MoreYourStory RSS Feed
