Israel Aerospace Industries Puts Four Indian Startups on Stage

Israel Aerospace Industries, the state-owned aerospace and defence manufacturer known as IAI, held the first demo day of its NeuSPHERE programme in Delhi, presenting four Indian startups drawn from its innovation acceleration scheme. The programme was launched in November 2024 and is run jointly with Green House Ventures, offering deep-technology companies mentorship, industry contacts and access to global markets.

The four companies (AquaAirX, Inferigence Quotient, Keploy and Dyau Robotics) are all based in Bengaluru, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Their demonstrations covered an amphibious drone, an artificial-intelligence system that lets unmanned aerial vehicles detect and avoid collisions, autonomous three-dimensional mapping for environments where satellite navigation is unavailable, and AI-driven testing for secure software systems. IAI's president and chief executive, Boaz Levy, said the event underlined the company's commitment to India's innovation ecosystem and called it “a platform for India's next generation of tech leaders to shape the future of defense innovation.”

What the four companies showed

The Defence Industry Europe report on the event matched the technologies to the companies: AquaAirX for the amphibious drone, Inferigence Quotient for detect-and-avoid, Keploy for the testing agent and Dyau Robotics for GPS-denied mapping. It described the event as a virtual demo day, and set out the fields the programme targets: artificial intelligence, big data, advanced navigation, quantum technologies, extended-reality maintenance and training, and wearable technology.

Why an Israeli defence giant runs an accelerator in Bengaluru

The programme is a response to Indian procurement policy as much as to Indian engineering. IAI has been working in India for more than four decades, but New Delhi's Make in India rules push foreign suppliers towards domestic production and local partners. Levy told Breaking Defense in January 2025 that the company needed to “tune ourselves and find the right ways to work together according to the new regulations in India”. IAI's existing footprint there includes the multi-billion-dollar MR-SAM air-defence missile programme developed with India's Defence Research and Development Organisation, a radar maintenance facility in Hyderabad and, more recently, a first NeuSPHERE office in New Delhi.

The size of the relationship behind it

Israel was the world's eighth-largest arms exporter over the five years to 2024, accounting for about 3.1% of global sales, with India among its principal customers alongside the United States and Germany, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute figures reported by Calcalist. That makes an accelerator aimed at Indian founders a commercial as well as a diplomatic instrument.

What the announcement did not say

IAI did not disclose how much it has invested in the programme, whether it takes equity in participating startups, or whether any of the four companies has a contract or purchase commitment from the group. It did not say how many companies applied or how the cohort was selected, and it gave no date for a second cohort.