OUR PRODUCTS ARE 'BUILT LIKE A BIRD AND TESTED LIKE A TANK'

In a freewheeling interview, Ankit Mehta, Co-founder and CEO of India’s first drone disruptor tech company talks about the idea behind building the brand – ideaForge. Edited excerpts:

- Rahul Kamat

Ankit, from where this idea of building a brand like ideaForge came to your mind?

I knew that I had a great team in the form of my cofounders. And along with that, we had done so much technical work as part of IIT Bombay, and our journey there that we used to feel like we were especially privileged to have been a part of the ecosystem that encouraged us to implement our ideas to work on our work projects.

And as against most people’s excitement to work on software at that time, we somehow were those oddballs that were excited and more focused on doing hardware. We felt that if we could think, we could do something and build something. And we had the privilege of not having to spend money out of our own pockets because the ecosystem supported our dreams.

Another intriguing aspect was that, as part of all of our college explorations, one of the projects that I and my co-founders wanted to take on was to build a hovercraft out of the engines that people would want to scavenge from the old discarded bikes that our alumni had left behind. So the idea was to collect and convert, make those engines functional, and make the hovercraft float. Incidentally, I used to head an innovation centre at IIT Bombay, which would fund any innovative idea.