Utkarsh Singh: "I don't think there are any limitations on India and Spain doing business together."

Utkarsh Singh is the Founder and CEO of DronaMaps, a cutting-edge technology company specializing in computer vision and autonomous systems. A Forbes “30 Under 30” (Asia) honoree, Utkarsh holds a degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, where his academic work with big data sparked his interest in analyzing and manipulating 3D geospatial data.

Which sectors or industries are the main beneficiaries of the solutions offered by Dronamaps?

The primary sectors that we work with... So, we are a drone analytics company, and the primary sectors we work with are road transport.

So, highways, rural roads, and similar sectors where drones can be utilized, or videos can be utilized to be able to scan the roads for defects or construction progress, and then analyzed using AI.

In India, typically, we also have historically worked with several other industries like mining, and railways, and power lines, so high-tension power lines, but our main focus is roadways and infrastructure. 

What key technologies underpin the Dronamaps platform?
We are a software company, so we are a platform-based company, and we work to be able to, first of all, automate the drones. So, all the drones that we work with are fully autonomous.

The brains of the drones, kind of, are built by the company, by Dronamaps, and they utilize our platform to be able to achieve autonomous flight. 
The second key piece of technology is 3D reconstruction. My alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, is the inventing institute of photogrammetry as a technology, and 3D reconstruction.

That's where we learnt it, that's where we started scaling it from. And so, 3D reconstruction at an infinite scale becomes our second key piece of technology, and the third, obviously, you know, is vision AI, being able to use a lot of AI-based models to be able to detect defects, and to be able to defect the construction progress across these infrastructure projects and the data that we're collecting with drones.

How does Dronamaps contribute to sustainable development?
First of all, all the drones, you know, there's two parts of sustainable development. One is within the company, and one is what impact we are making to other companies and our clients. So, within the company, all the data collection mechanisms that we have are completely electric propulsion-based.

So, all the drones are electric propulsion, none of them are gasoline or diesel. So, that's one area where we try to stay green. All the data centers that we use, which are Government of India certified, they're usually running on completely renewable energy, so all the processing of it also happens on certified green data centers.

And now, about the clients: when we are working, for instance, in the road, transport and highways industry, when we are trying to find out the defects, it reduces the cost of maintenance, it reduces the cost of emissions that go into doing those maintenance, because road surfacing by itself is a very polluting industry, right? The tar that you use, the maintenance, the bitumen that you use to be able to pave the roads and the concrete, the cement that you use, they're very, very environmentally hazardous materials.

So, we try and reduce the quantity that is being used, that's number one, with proactive maintenance, with proactive reports, defect detection, and construction progress. And second, we are helping our clients to be able to make the entire process a lot more automated and hence result in robotic automation and to the granularity of fixing every different defect, including cracks, potholes and all of these things. That means when the entire cycle is dependent on a large degree of automation with human-in-the-loop AI, that ends up bringing together a lot of predictive maintenance, so you would end up maintaining, say, maybe a 200-metre stretch for potholes as opposed to a 2-kilometre stretch for potholes a year later and hence contributing massively to emission standards and to non-sustainable infrastructure development in that way.

So, manual processes are always human error prone, they're always much more laborious, they're always much more energy inefficient. When we're depending on automation with human-in-the-loop verification systems, one, we can ensure the quality, two, we can deliver it at massive efficiency and three, we can do that pre-emptively and proactively before those defects start taking the shape and destroying the entire infrastructure of kilometres at a stretch, being able to do that.

What is your overall impression of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Spain?
I think there are very interesting companies. We learn from a bunch of large infrastructure companies, those are our clientele, that's who we look up to, that's who we plan to be in the future. o, there's that.

In terms of startups, there's been a deep tech, you know, a lot of hardware focus, at least the companies that we visited. They're doing large-scale drones, they're doing large-scale robotics, they're doing a lot of hardware development. That's quite exciting to see.

That's a little challenging to pull off in India and the reason is funding. The reason is, you know, availability of grants and funding to be able to do R&D at a million-dollar scale, millions of dollars of scale and clearly that is available at least to some great companies in Europe and in Spain. So, we felt nice that, okay, that somewhere in the world, you know, there are investors, there are people willing to spend on this technology, whether that is space-faring technologies or technologies that will advance the evolution of the human race maybe 10 years, maybe 20 years down the line.

People are willing to put their thoughts and process behind it and so I think that was very inspiring. India has a second largest, I believe, startup ecosystem in the world but India is also very software-centric.

The investments in hardware manufacturing are fairly limited. So, I would want to take this back from Spain to India that, okay, we can invest more in hardware even though the timeline may be, you know, a moonshot, you know, robots for moon, for Mars, for space-faring civilizations and things like that. And also, we would want to probably bring that from India, the software expertise and the scale at which we operate in India and maybe, you know, help the Spanish startups and our collaborators and future partners be able to utilize extremely low-cost, large-scale software-driven mechanisms to be able to gain larger efficiencies and larger energy savings and sustainability.

So, do you think there are opportunities for cooperation between Spain and India in this area?
Oh, yes, absolutely. So, entrepreneurship, by definition, is the same across the world, right? Everywhere there's a company, there's a charter to the company, there's a product that it makes and there's a balance sheet that it keeps and there's money to be made, very importantly.

There are investments to be raised. So, it doesn't matter if it's the U.S., if it's India, if it's Spain, if it's Europe, if it's Africa, startups are essentially the same, investors are essentially the same. It's the same circular economy where investors are putting in money, companies are growing, eventually booking their profits, eventually hiring smaller companies, encouraging the next wave and generation of startups.

So, I don't see it as that there would be any potential limitations in India and Spain doing business together and encouraging each other's startups, especially tech startups, in the age of AI, in the age of 2025 and heading towards the second half of the 21st century, I don't believe there's any barriers or any differences in being able to help each other as companies, right? And I'll take a case-in-point example for that. So, for instance, Spain is very proud about its language and a lot of population speaks Spanish and only Spanish and not English.

And the same is with India. A lot of the population speaks only Hindi or the regional language and not English or a common language. Now, in the era of 2025 and later, I wouldn't imagine that there should be would be any issues in being able to remove these language barriers and make sure that people are able to exchange technology, know-how and be able to do business together, encourage each other, help each other. Like, for instance, one of the startups we met was building rockets and propulsion systems for the space systems, but they're launching using the Indian rocket system from Antrix, which is a commercial space arm from India and as a low-cost launch provider services. So, I think cost efficiencies, energy efficiencies are the future of the world.

It doesn't matter if it's India or Spain or the US or anywhere else. That is where the world is automatically heading. That is where we can all help each other.

And despite all the concerning geopolitics of the generation, at the end of the day, startups want to create business, want to create value. Large companies want to encourage tartups to be able to create that value and stand shoulder to shoulder to be able to increase the total wealth generation, value generation and societal improvement that we can contribute to the world.

What has been your favorite activity through this trip and what are you taking away from the moment from this experience?
There are two answers to this question. One is the business answer. We had a great trip at Acciona, who I believe is a very good fit to be our future client.
I think there's a lot of value that we can add to their processes, to the highways and to the infrastructure that they're building. But your question kind of points towards maybe the most fun thing. So, I'm not a hardware company.

We're a software company. And yet, we got the opportunity to visit Airbus and see their manufacturing up close and in person. And it was inspiring.
It was inspiring. We feel amazed at the scale at which Airbus operates. We feel amazed at the opportunity to be able to visit their factories and to be able to visit their final assembly plants and see the aircrafts and the maintenance overall and the entire display.

I was also at the Paris Air Show… So, I had a little bit of, you know, brief into the performance of Airbus internationally on that stage. And to come back just a few days later and to see all of that being manufactured right in front of our eyes was, for me personally, being an aviation guy, being a drone guy, being within the aerospace industry, it was fascinating.

I think I would enjoy that more than any Disneyland that I would ever visit. 

VIII edition activity summary