Indian startup shows first look at new jet-powered drone

Indian defense startup Apollyon Dynamics has released the first photos of its Nightshade Mk-2, a new jet-powered drone that the Hyderabad-based company is developing as a successor to the Nightshade it unveiled earlier this year.

Co-founder and CEO Jayant Khatri shared an image of the aircraft lying on a hangar floor next to a team member for scale, while the company’s official account posted darker teaser shots under the caption “Nightshade Mk-2 SOON!”

The photo shows a compact jet autonomous aircraft with a pointed nose, a slender fuselage, sharply swept wings with control surfaces along the trailing edges, and a small turbojet engine mounted in a pod on top of the rear fuselage above a pair of swept tailplanes.

Apollyon Dynamics has not yet published performance figures for the Mk-2, but its predecessor gives an idea of where the design is heading. The company unveiled the Nightshade ADX-1 in August as a jet-powered combat drone that it says cruises and attacks at 600 to 700 km/h (370 to 435 mph), carries up to 5 kg (11 pounds) of explosives, weighs up to 70 kg (154 pounds) at takeoff and can strike targets more than 100 km (62 miles) inside hostile territory, with future versions expected to reach beyond 150 km (93 miles).

The company says the Nightshade uses inertial navigation with terrain-following so it can keep flying accurately when GPS signals are jammed or spoofed, and it has test-launched the drone from the roof of a moving vehicle, which it describes as a first for a jet-powered system in India. Apollyon is offering the Nightshade in several configurations, including a target drone for air defense training, a decoy and a loitering munition, and it plans to deliver pilot batches of the target-drone version to the Indian Army by December, with trials of the loitering munition expected next year.

Apollyon Dynamics grew out of a student project at the BITS Pilani campus in Hyderabad and was founded in May 2025 by Khatri and Sourya Choudhury, who quickly drew attention when Indian Army units in Jammu, Chandimandir, Panagarh and Arunachal Pradesh began using the startup’s high-speed kamikaze drones, which the company says can fly at more than 300 km/h (186 mph). The company raised a $480,000 pre-seed round led by Naandi Ventures, employs about 20 people across two manufacturing labs in Hyderabad and is aiming to raise $5 million in a seed round within six months.

The Mk-2 is part of a wider shift at the company, which has stopped building conventional quadcopter-style drones to focus on faster systems, including the jet-powered Nightshade family, an interceptor called Ahuti Mk II with a reported top speed of 498 km/h (309 mph) and a maritime uncrewed system known as Project Piranha. Apollyon has given no date for the Mk-2’s first flight or public debut beyond its promise that the aircraft is coming soon.