- The drone can help in delivering medicines and organs to remote hospitals, thereby bypassing the problems of emergency road transport.
India’s Zoho Corporation said that it will invest in Tamil Nadu based drone startup Yali Aerospace as part to its move to promote local companies.
“We are happy to announce our investment in Yali Aerospace, a drone startup based in Tanjavur led by the husband and wife team of Dinesh Baluraj and Anugraha. They returned from the Netherlands to their hometown of Tanjavur to start this,” Vembu wrote on the X platform, formerly Twitter, on May 28.
He didn’t disclose the investment details.
Baluraj comes from an Aerospace engineering background having done his masters from Technical University of Munich.
Yali introduces an era of delivering medical commodities to any destination in India in less than 20 minutes through the Yali Network Bridge.
The Thanjavur-based startup has built a fixed wing drone with vertical take-off and landing capabilities.
The drone, with a range of 150km, payload of 7kg, and a maximum speed of 155km/hr, can help in delivering medicines and organs to remote hospitals, thereby bypassing the problems of emergency road transport.
Zoho, the first bootstrapped company in the world to cross 100 million users and the company serves over 700,000 businesses across 150 countries, is working towards growing tier 2 and 3 cities.
Zoho Founder Sridhar Vembu’s announcement comes at a time when Zoho has been investing in artificial intelligence and data centres, areas beyond its core business.
On May 16, Reuters said Zoho was planning a foray into chip-making and seeking incentives from the government. One of the sources pegged the investment plan at $700 million.
In March, Zoho announced investing close to Rs1,100 crore for Saudi Arabia’s digital infrastructure development and strategic partnerships with local government entities contributing to the Saudi Vision 2030.