Indian startups are coming up with some major breakthroughs in the defence space.
The latest example comes out of Mumbai, where a company called Techno Defence has managed to build a piece of missile technology that, until now, only a handful of countries in the world knew how to make. The product itself is tiny, weighing just 10 grams, but it solves a problem that sits at the very heart of how modern guided missiles find their targets.
What The Tech Actually Does
To understand why this matters, it helps to know how a missile “sees” its target in the first place. Many advanced missiles use infrared seekers to lock onto heat signatures, essentially tracking the warmth given off by an aircraft, vehicle, or any other target. But there’s a catch. At normal room temperature, the sensor itself generates its own heat and electronic noise, and this noise is often stronger than the faint infrared signal coming from a target that could be several kilometres away. It’s a bit like trying to spot a candle flame while standing next to a bonfire.
The way engineers get around this is by cooling the sensor down to extremely low temperatures, around -196°C, which is cryogenic territory. At that temperature, the sensor’s own background noise all but disappears, letting the faint heat signature of the actual target come through clearly. This is what allows the missile to track its target with precision instead of losing it in a haze of interference.
The device that does this cooling is called a Joule-Thomson Cooler, or JT Cooler for short. It needs to be compact, extremely lightweight, free of vibration, and fast enough to chill the sensor in a matter of seconds, since a missile obviously doesn’t have the luxury of waiting around. Building one that actually meets all these requirements at a production scale is where things get difficult, and it’s why this technology has historically stayed locked up with a small set of countries, including the US, France, and Israel. It even falls under the Missile Technology Control Regime, an international arrangement that restricts the export of missile-related equipment and know-how.
How A Mumbai Startup Cracked It
Techno Defence is co-owned by Dr Pravin Salinkar, an IIT Bombay alumnus, along with Sudarshan Saraf, an IIT Bombay alumnus as well. The company’s journey into this space traces back to a meeting between Salinkar and a lab director at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) sometime between 2017 and 2018, which eventually led him to take on the challenge of building this cooling capability indigenously.
In 2020, the company received support under DRDO’s Technology Development Fund scheme, which is meant to back the design and development of defence technologies within the country. From there, a small team of engineers and technicians, largely women, worked on building out the JT Cooler, and by 2023-24, the project had reached a stage where it could be handed over to DRDO for trials, which turned out to be successful.
What makes this a lean manufacturing story rather than a big-budget corporate one is the scale at which it happened. Rather than leaning on massive infrastructure, Techno Defence built its own specialised production techniques and equipment, drawing on small-scale and cottage industries for parts of the process. The assembly work itself demands people working under a microscope, using pure materials in clean environments, all while sticking to strict quality controls needed to meet defence-grade reliability. It’s the kind of precision work usually associated with much larger, better-funded defence contractors.
Why This Matters For India’s Defence Sector
Beyond the engineering feat, there’s a bigger opportunity here. This kind of cooling technology isn’t needed by every missile, since designs that rely on satellite navigation for guidance don’t require it. But for infrared-seeking missiles, it’s a critical component, and one that India has now shown it can build on its own rather than depend on imports for.
For a company as young and lean as Techno Defence to develop a capability that only a few nations have historically possessed opens up the possibility of India exporting this kind of critical component rather than just using it domestically. It also fits into a broader pattern that’s been building over the last few years, where India’s private defence sector is starting to produce genuinely differentiated technology instead of assembling licensed designs from other countries. Drone maker ideaForge, also founded by IIT Bombay alumni, is another example of a homegrown company that has managed to win serious defence contracts by building its own hardware rather than depending on foreign suppliers.
Whether Techno Defence can scale up production and turn this into a genuine export business remains to be seen, but the underlying achievement, a small team cracking a technology that major defence powers have guarded closely for decades, is hard to overstate.