Kajal Shah, the Dreamfly Innovations founder story

On 1 December 2023, at the Bengaluru Tech Summit, Karnataka’s Minister for IT and BT unveiled 22 battery variants from a two-year-old startup most of the room had never heard of. The batteries were branded EIONIC. They were built for agricultural drones, terrain-mapping drones and cargo drones, and the pitch was blunt: these cells don’t explode. For a founder who had spent years inside engine bays and aviation labs watching how energy behaves when it goes wrong, that was the whole point.

The founder was Kajal Shah, co-founder and chief executive of Dreamfly Innovations. Her path to a drone-battery company reads less like a pivot and more like a straight line drawn through two decades of engineering.

Early life

Kajal Shah keeps a low personal profile, and little of her childhood or family background sits in the public record. What is documented is an engineer’s résumé, built early and built deliberately. Rather than fill the gaps with guesswork, this story sticks to what her education, career and company actually show, which turns out to be plenty.

Education

Shah is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, where she earned an M.Tech. IIT Bombay is one of India’s toughest engineering schools to get into, and it put her on a track toward the hard, unglamorous end of the industry: powertrains, cell chemistry, the physics of heat. Her co-founder, Dr Saurabh Markandeya, came out of the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, where he completed his PhD between 2013 and 2019. Between an IIT Bombay engineer and an IISc doctorate, Dreamfly started life with a founding team that could argue about electrochemistry over lunch.

Career before Dreamfly Innovations

Shah did not begin in startups. She started on the factory-and-lab side of Indian industry as an engine design manager, then spent roughly four years at Tata Motors as an R&D manager. After that she moved into aviation, working at GE Aviation as an aviation technologist. Those jobs matter to the Dreamfly story because they are where she learned two things at once: how power systems fail, and how heavily regulated industries decide what to trust.

She had also done this before. Prior to Dreamfly she co-founded an early EV-tech venture, and in 2019 that company was named ‘Best Green Energy Startup’ by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. By the time she started Dreamfly, Shah was a second-time founder, and so was Markandeya. The pair describe more than a decade of combined, overlapping work across clean energy and mobility, much of it spent close to the cell itself.

Why she started Dreamfly Innovations

Shah and Markandeya founded Dreamfly Innovations in 2022 in Bengaluru. The gap they set out to close was specific. India’s drone sector was growing fast, but almost every serious drone relied on the same generic lithium-polymer packs, imported and unremarkable. Those packs run hot, wear out quickly, and carry a real fire risk. Shah has put the underlying problem plainly: the biggest thing holding Indian drone-makers back, she argues, is the lack of a homegrown component ecosystem, which forces domestic manufacturers to depend on imported materials.

So the founders picked the component nobody wanted to reinvent. A battery is the part of a drone most likely to kill the mission or the machine, and it was the part India was importing. Building a better one at home fit neatly inside the country’s Atmanirbhar Bharat push for domestic manufacturing, and it opened onto a market that EY-FICCI has projected could reach $4.2 billion by 2025 and $23 billion by 2030.

The early struggle

Deep-tech hardware is a slow, capital-hungry business, and a battery that claims to be non-flammable has to earn that claim in testing, not marketing. The founders leaned on their combined experience across SMART batteries and different cell chemistries, and settled on graphene-based cells as the route to safety without a crippling weight penalty. In their own words, the goal was batteries that are “safe, fire resistant, and give accurate flight predictability for a smooth flying and precision landing.”

Turning that into a product that a defence contractor would bolt onto an aircraft is a longer road than a consumer launch. It meant proving thermal behaviour, cycle life and cold-weather performance to buyers who do not forgive failures. Getting the first cheque was part of clearing that bar.

Funding & revenue

Dreamfly’s first external round arrived in September 2023: about $300,000 led by the Rebalance angel community, with participation from CIIE.CO, the incubator at IIM Ahmedabad. That money went into commercialising the graphene battery and building out the team. The EIONIC launch at the Bengaluru Tech Summit followed within months.

In early February 2025 the company raised a larger seed round of $1.4 million, roughly Rs 12 crore, led by Avaana Capital with Sunicon Ventures and other investors joining. Dreamfly earmarked the capital for production capacity, hiring and further R&D. That takes the disclosed funding across the two rounds to close to $1.7 million.

Revenue figures are not public, but the customer list is, and for a young hardware company it is the more telling number. Dreamfly’s batteries have gone to Tata Advanced Systems, Larsen & Toubro, General Aeronautics and Neosky India, the kind of buyers who run their own qualification labs before they sign anything.

Kajal Shah’s net worth & ownership

There is no credible public figure for Kajal Shah’s net worth, and anyone quoting one is guessing. Dreamfly is a privately held, venture-backed company that has not disclosed its cap table or a valuation, so a founder’s stake cannot be honestly translated into a rupee number. What can be said is grounded: Shah is a co-founder and the chief executive, which means she holds founder equity in a business that has raised close to $1.7 million and counts India’s largest defence and engineering names as customers. Her wealth, whatever it is, is tied up in that ownership rather than in any reported payout.

Growth strategy

Dreamfly’s strategy is to win on the engineering, then productise it widely. Under the EIONIC brand the company sells smart drone batteries across agriculture, terrain mapping, surveillance and logistics, and it launched 22 variants at once rather than a single hero product. The technical claims are concrete. Thermal case designs cut operating temperatures by as much as 20°C, which lowers fire risk and steadies performance. A sub-zero line uses passive thermal management to keep working down to around −30°C for high-altitude flying. And where a generic LiPo pack might manage 200 charge cycles, EIONIC cells are rated to about 500, a longevity gap that changes the economics for any operator flying every day.

The bet underneath all of it is import substitution. If Indian drone-makers no longer have to buy cells from abroad, the company that builds the trusted domestic alternative gets to grow with the whole sector. That is a patient strategy, and it suits founders who have spent their careers close to the hardware.

What Kajal Shah’s story teaches Indian founders

The obvious lesson is about picking your problem. Shah did not chase the flashy end of the drone boom. She went after the component everyone was importing and nobody was fixing, then used two decades of engine and aviation experience to fix it credibly. Deep tech rewards founders who have earned the right to make a hard claim, and a non-flammable battery is exactly the kind of claim you can only sell if buyers believe your lab.

The quieter lesson is about staying in your lane long enough for it to compound. An IIT Bombay engineer, a Tata Motors R&D stint, an aviation posting, an award-winning first startup, and only then Dreamfly: each step added to the same body of knowledge. When she and Markandeya finally built their own cell, they were not starting over. They were cashing in twenty years of it.

Frequently asked questions about Kajal Shah and Dreamfly Innovations

Who is Kajal Shah?

Kajal Shah is an Indian engineer and entrepreneur, the co-founder and CEO of Dreamfly Innovations, a Bengaluru battery-technology startup she founded in 2022 with Dr Saurabh Markandeya. An M.Tech from IIT Bombay, she previously worked in engine design, at Tata Motors as an R&D manager and at GE Aviation, and had earlier co-founded an EV-tech startup that won a national ‘Best Green Energy Startup’ award in 2019.

What is Kajal Shah’s net worth?

There is no reliable, publicly reported figure for Kajal Shah’s net worth. Dreamfly Innovations is a privately held, venture-backed company that has not disclosed a valuation or its shareholding, so any specific number would be speculation. As a co-founder and CEO she holds founder equity in a business that has raised roughly $1.7 million.

What does Dreamfly Innovations do?

Dreamfly Innovations designs and makes high-performance, non-flammable batteries for drones, aviation and aerospace, sold under the EIONIC brand. Its graphene-based cells are built for safety and longevity, with thermal designs that cut operating temperatures by up to 20°C, sub-zero variants rated to about −30°C, and a cycle life of roughly 500 charges. Customers include Tata Advanced Systems, L&T, General Aeronautics and Neosky India.

How much funding has Dreamfly Innovations raised?

Dreamfly has disclosed two rounds. In September 2023 it raised about $300,000 led by the Rebalance angel community with participation from IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE.CO. In February 2025 it raised a $1.4 million (about Rs 12 crore) seed round led by Avaana Capital, with Sunicon Ventures and others. That is close to $1.7 million in total disclosed funding.

What can founders learn from Dreamfly Innovations?

Solve the boring, critical component rather than the visible one. Dreamfly went after the imported drone battery, the part most likely to fail a mission, and made a safer domestic version buyers could trust. It is a case study in deep-tech patience: pick a problem your own engineering background lets you defend, then prove the claim in testing before you sell it.