Cognizant has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Garuda Aerospace, one of India's leading drone startups, to power its drones with advanced digital capabilities and bring innovative solutions at scale for enterprises aiming to achieve greater agility, productivity, and overall outcomes.

“We are excited to collaborate with Garuda Aerospace, combine our deep industry knowledge with capabilities such as advanced data analytics, real-time insights and software development to elevate drone-based solutions and new use cases for enterprises across sectors. Drone services are one of the fastest growing technology segments with the potential to provide extraordinary value to industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, energy and utilities, retail and logistics,” said Achal Kataria, Vice President and India Country Head, Cognizant.

Cognizant and Garuda Aerospace are collectively set to bring a plethora of end-to-end drone-based management and monitoring offerings for businesses across sectors. For the agriculture sector, a new offering provides intelligent water and soil management, crop spraying, aerial planting, among others. For energy and utilities, an aerial intelligence solution helps in asset inspection, storm impact assessment, fire safety, among other operational areas. And, in warehouse management, the drones can be used for inventory audit, tracking of products, video surveillance, and even help move lightweight objects. These drone-based solutions will also enable businesses achieve their sustainability goals by helping drive efficient use of resources.

Agnishwar Jayaprakash, Founder and CEO, Garuda Aerospace, added, “This collaboration with Cognizant will further enhance our ‘Made in India’ drones with world-class technolgies and catalyze new, innovative solutions to help clients and their customers around the world. We have an innovative business model, an amazing team, and now the right collaboration with Cognizant to reach our desired scale. We hope to propel the entire industry forward with our growth.”

Garuda Aerospace boasts a fleet of 400 drones and a well-trained team of over 500 pilots in 26 cities across the country. Former Indian cricket team captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni represents the company as its Brand Ambassador.

The collaboration will provide Cognizant associates across its service lines, including, analytics, IoT, among others, the opportunity to work on such purpose-driven drone projects and real-life use cases. Additionally, associates keen to be trained as drone pilots will have access to Garuda Aerospace’s training facilities.

Globally, Cognizant’s Drone Analytics Information Services practice has a broad array of partners, offering services from flight operations to image processing and advanced business intelligence. The practice also offers services such as drone data capture, data and managed services, big data management, artificial intelligence, application integration and business consulting.

Garuda Aerospace is a human-centric brand that is focused on developing low-cost drone solutions to optimise industries through accurate data. Started in 2015, the company has already made a significant mark on the drone industry with the Drone-As-A-Software aggregator. This aggregator designs impeccable drones for a myriad of human and industrial needs offering various drone solutions to the industry. Garuda Aerospace has received national and international recognition for its success in the drone sector.