A student-founded Indian defense startup at BITS Pilani Hyderabad went from hand-built FPV kamikaze
drones to a jet-propelled strike UAV in one year. These are the core ideas from RuntimeBRT's
facility tour of Apollyon Dynamics, drawn out as charts and diagrams.
One year from dorm-room drones to a jet UAV prototype
Founded
May 19, 2025
video shot on its 1st birthday
Team size
~15
people, hiring across roles
Nightshade top speed
700 km/h
jet-propelled UAV
Strike depth
100+ km
into enemy territory
Payload
5 kg
explosives
Why jets
The speed ladder: slow drones are easy kills
Shahed-class loitering munitions cruise at 150–200 km/h — slow enough for modern
air defenses to intercept at rates the video puts above 75%. Apollyon's bet is that at 700 km/h,
nothing short of a multi-million-dollar surface-to-air missile can touch you.
Apollyon systemsReference platforms
Bars show the upper end of each stated range. The interceptor figure is the design
target for the new variant; the earlier ADI interceptor flew ~300 km/h.
View as table
Platform
Speed (km/h)
Noted in video as
Shahed-class loitering munition
150–200
“barely 150 to 200 kmph”
Indian Army 10-inch FPV drones
≈150–200
“a little slower or on the same lines”
5-inch FPV kamikaze (demoed)
≈200
high thrust-to-weight config
Apollyon kamikaze drone (original)
300
what the company started with
Apollyon interceptor (new target)
350–400
up from ~300 on earlier ADI design
Nightshade ADX-1 jet UAV
700
“cruise-missile-class tech for the UAV segment”
Capability jump
Speed, payload, and reach — the jet UAV vs. what came before
Traditional FPV strike drones hit targets 10–30 km away with 1–1.5 kg of explosive.
The Nightshade is pitched as a different class: 5 kg of payload delivered 100+ km deep, at 3–4× the speed.
Speed (km/h)
Explosive payload (kg)
Strike range (km)
View as table
Measure
Traditional strike drones
Nightshade ADX-1
Speed (km/h)
150–300
700
Payload (kg)
1–1.5
5
Strike range (km)
10–30
100+
Battlefield economics
“Even if you intercept every Shahed, you still lose”
The core problem Apollyon says it's solving: cost asymmetry. Shooting down a ~$50K drone
with a $1–1.5M missile means the defender bleeds money on every successful intercept. An aggressor
can keep sending cheap drones until the defender goes broke.
Cost per engagement (US$)
A defender using SAMs pays roughly 20–30× the attacker's cost per engagement —
and that's the successful case.
View as table
Asset
Approx. cost
Shahed-class attack drone
$50,000
Surface-to-air missile to stop it
$1,000,000–1,500,000
The catch-22 the Nightshade creates
Flip the same logic around: when a fast, deep-striking jet UAV is inbound, the defender
has only two moves — and both cost them.
The problem with slow drones
Over 75% of traditional loitering munitions get intercepted
In Ukraine, combined soft-kill (jamming) and hard-kill (physical interception) rates against
conventional loitering munitions exceed 75% in some cases. Each square below is one drone in a wave of 100.
Intercepted (75)Reaches target (25)
“Imagine you send a thousand drones and 900 of them get shot down… it's pointless.”
Speed is the counter: interceptors and anti-aircraft artillery that comfortably catch a 150–200 km/h
drone can't economically engage one doing 700 km/h.
Air defense 101
Soft kill vs. hard kill
“I thought a kill is a kill.” Not quite — the two families of counter-drone defense fail
in very different ways.
Soft kill — electronic warfare
Jammers and spoofers attack the drone's radio link or GPS instead of the drone itself.
Cheap per engagement, but not reliable: against a drone with EW hardening
(like frequency hopping), jamming “will do nothing.”
Hard kill — physical destruction
An interceptor rams the target (kinetic kill) or detonates a small warhead next to it
(proximity fuse). More decisive: “when you're blowing something up, it can't keep
coming at you.”
Apollyon calls its interceptor an ESAM — “electric surface-to-air missile”:
a rugby-ball-shaped drone with a Jetson computer inside, built as a far cheaper hard-kill option
against Shahed-class targets flying under 200 km/h. The squishy foam base is an in-house innovation
that lets test units bounce on landing instead of cracking.
How the interceptor works
Radar guides the flight; a seeker finishes the job
The production interceptor engages in phases: a ground radar steers it for the
initial and mid-course legs, then an onboard seeker takes over for the last ~500 m — fully
automated, no link required.
Kinetic-kill variant
Rams the target to break its fuselage — used against smaller loitering munitions. The airframe
itself is the weapon.
Explosive variant
Carries a small warhead with a proximity fuse — detonates near the target rather
than needing a direct hit. “That is a 100% kill rate, basically.”
Electronic warfare hardening
Frequency hopping: why their drones survived army jammers
A jammer floods one slice of spectrum with noise. FHSS (frequency-hopping spread spectrum)
moves the control link across frequencies ~400 times per second — the jammer only ever blankets
a sliver of the transmission, so the link holds.
The founders — second-year students at the time — took their drones in front of
army jammers expecting them to drop (“we just wanted to see what a jammer looked like”). Their basic
~400-hops/second FHSS link held up well enough in the trials, including against bigger jammers at Ambala,
that it won them their first army order.
Why FPV drones are so violent
A 20:1 thrust-to-weight ratio
The racing drone flown in the demo weighs about 500 g but its motors produce 10 kg of
thrust — a thrust-to-weight ratio of 20:1. (A modern fighter jet manages roughly 1:1.) That's what
buys ~200 km/h speed and tornado-tight maneuvers — at the price of a ~2-minute battery.
Thrust vs. weight — each square = 500 g
Thrust10 kg
Weight0.5 kg
Thrust-to-weight
20:1
10 kg thrust · 500 g drone
Battery
6S · 1500 mAh
≈2 min of aggressive flying
Interceptor motor
7 kg
thrust per motor, high-voltage
Demo drone speed
≈200 km/h
5-inch racing frame
Nightshade ADX-1
One airframe, two mission families
ADX-1 stands for “Apollyon Dynamics Experiment 1” — the first prototype, running German
and Taiwanese jet engines, about a year from field deployment. The production system is designed
around two roles.
Deep strike
SEAD — suppression of enemy air defenses. Home in on radars and SAM batteries and
destroy them: “a blind enemy is an enemy that cannot strike.” Without working air defenses, the
enemy can't contest the sky without massive fighter losses.
Runway denial (offensive counter-air). Crater enemy runways preemptively at the
start of a war — “the fanciest fifth-generation fighter jets are just fancy toys on the ground”
if they can't take off.
Target / decoy
Training target. Fitted with radar cross-section enhancers, the small UAV appears
on an air-defense radar as a full-sized manned aircraft — a high-speed expendable aerial target
for SAM crews to practice on.
Decoy. The same aircraft sent over enemy territory baits air defenses into wasting
$1M+ surface-to-air missiles on an inexpensive UAV — draining the defender's magazine and wallet.
The company name follows the same theme: Apollyon is
the Greek name of Abaddon, the destroying angel of the abyss — “systems of destruction, but destruction
for the greater good.” Tagline: “Machines go first, so that humans can come home.”
The story
Year one: from LinkedIn cold-outreach to a jet program
May 2025
Founded at BITS Pilani (May 19) — exams end, outreach begins
Two second-year students with no defense network cold-message retired army officers
on LinkedIn; one referral from a serving Lt. Colonel gets them a no-cost-no-commitment demo slot.
A professor gifts them their first ₹500 — now framed in the office.
May 21, 2025
First army demo, 6 a.m.
They show a 300 km/h kamikaze drone, a bomb-dropper, and an FPV. “It's one thing to
say 300 kmph on a slide, another to show it in front of their face.” The one-day trip stretches to
three as brigadiers are called in; bomb-drop tests graduate from rocks to real plastic explosives.
Mid 2025
Jammer trials → first order
Expecting their drones to drop, they fly against army jammers anyway. Their
~400-hops/sec FHSS link survives well enough — including against the bigger jammers at Ambala —
to win their first army order.
Late 2025
Drones shipped across commands
Sales to units in Jammu (most), Chandimandir, Arunachal Pradesh, Babina, and the
Western and Northern commands. Every unit brings a different problem statement — more than a
15-person team can absorb.
~Dec 2025 – Jan 2026
The pivot: stop selling drones, build jet UAVs
Mentor Arvind (co-founder/CEO of Tonbo Imaging) points out ~500 Indian startups
already sell drones to the army — no marginal utility. Apollyon moves to the near-empty jet UAV
segment: “While the country races to build Shaheds, we want to make Shaheds obsolete.”
2026
Funding stack builds up
Pre-seed closed; strategic round underway with Tonbo Imaging; seed round opening
to fund manufacturing facilities.
May 19, 2026
One year old — Nightshade ADX-1 in wind-tunnel testing
~15 people. Jet engines under test at the BITS Pilani Hyderabad wind tunnel;
field deployment targeted about a year out. Core value, in their words: “moving fast and failing
fast — the pace is the moat.”