By: Dawn Zoldi
India-headquartered Karshak Drones has been diligently building one of the most cohesive small drone ecosystems in the market. By pairing rugged airframes with deep vertical integration in avionics, software and operations, this company’s aircraft keep missions running when conditions are far from ideal. In a recent Dawn of Autonomy episode, CTO and Co‑Founder Sasikiran “Sasi” Golivi and Vice President and CMO Sai Praneetha Mutyala described an architecture built around accountability, endurance and performance under real-world stress.
From Coastal Test Ranges to a Unified Platform
Karshak’s story began in India’s agricultural fields and coastal corridors, where early work with off‑the‑shelf multicopters repeatedly hit the same wall. Systems that looked promising in the lab began to fray under daily operational pressure. Sasi tested platforms along the Bay of Bengal and saw firsthand how humidity, salt, wind and fragmented landholdings exposed the limits of “assembled” drones built from third‑party components.
“Nature does not care about brochures or spec sheets,” Sasi noted. “We learned the hard way testing drones in coastal areas. And that experience defined our obsession with engineering details so the pilot does not have to sweat them.”
This relentless feedback loop from the field pushed Karshak toward vertical integration: owning the design of frames, avionics, power and software so that when something fails, they know exactly which line of code, composite layer or parameter is responsible.
Trust, Vertical Integration and “Intelligent Failure”
Praneetha’s background in healthcare technology deeply shapes Karshak’s view of autonomy and risk. In hospitals, she saw powerful systems behave very differently once they left controlled environments and met the messy realities of human workflows, a lesson she now applies directly to drones.
“Most systems do impressive things under ideal conditions and for limited periods of time, but on repeated missions their reliability starts to fray,” she explained. “Drones are no longer episodic; they are used every day, so failure is not surprising—it is expected.” For Karshak, this means designing platforms for how they behave when things go wrong repeatedly: degraded links, operator fatigue, shifting requirements and weather that refuses to cooperate.
Operators across defense, public safety and industry consistently ask for “speed,” but not just in the sense of fast aircraft or quick deployment. They want continuity under stress so operations keep going even as conditions deteriorate.
Focused on building to real operator needs, the company’s experiments with off‑the‑shelf autopilots, radios, and propulsion quickly produced what Sasi calls the “Frankenstein problem,” components that tested well individually but refused to behave as a coherent system once assembled. When crashes occurred, no one could say whether the root cause was software, structure, propulsion or a sensor. That lack of traceable accountability was unacceptable for operations in defense, public safety and industrial environments.
Karshak responded by tightly coupling hardware and software, working with the ArduPilot open‑source autopilot community and tailoring control logic for tricopters and VTOL transitions that are rarely supported out of the box. Every failure becomes a data point in an internal loop that maps to a specific parameter set or structural choice, which allows the team to iterate quickly.
“We do not design for zero failure,” Sasi says. “Uncertainty is inevitable, so we design for intelligent failure, where clarity in failure is the only way to guarantee reliability in the future.”
That philosophy also resonates with operators who are tired of finger pointing between hardware, software and sensor vendors when something goes wrong. Karshak aims to be the single accountable owner on both good and bad days. The result: an entire fleet of purpose-built resilient drones.
One Brain, Three Bodies: Inside the Karshak Fleet
Instead of a single “hero” airframe, Karshak’s current ecosystem revolves around three purpose‑built platforms. Sasi describes the philosophy as “one brain and three bodies,” where a unified control and software stack underpins specialized aircraft for different operational envelopes.
These aircraft share a common avionics and design DNA: the Shark Hawk vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) tricopter, the Shark Hawk VTOL R harsh‑weather variant and the “E+”a long‑endurance twin‑engine fixed‑wing “mothership” :
- Shark Hawk VTOL: A quiet, tilt‑rotor tricopter designed as a “silent scalpel” for ISR, patrol and tactical scouting in urban or sensitive environments.
- Shark Hawk VTOL R: A hardened aircraft engineered for high‑altitude mountains and coastal zones, tuned for gusty winds, cold and corrosive air.
- Shark Hawk E+: A hand‑launchable, high‑endurance platform used as a communication relay and long‑range intelligence asset with 4–5 hours of flight time, depending on payload.
All three platforms inherit Karshak’s design language and structural symmetry, meaning common training, maintenance and mission planning, even as the roles diverge. The company built aircraft to support its broader mission set: agriculture, defense and government, industrial inspection, rail and transport and critical infrastructure monitoring.
The Shark Hawk: Quiet Power for Front‑Line ISR
The Shark Hawk is the system that first caught attention on the floor at Commercial UAV Expo, in part because its airframe embodies biomimicry from both sharks and hawks. The fuselage and wings borrow from hydrodynamic shark forms to minimize parasitic drag and acoustic signature, while the control and maneuverability envelope channels hawk‑like agility for low‑altitude, precise operations.
Operationally, the Shark Hawk is configured as a tilt‑rotor tricopter VTOL with approximately 6.4 kg all‑up weight, up to roughly 800 g of payload and around 90 minutes of endurance on electric power. That performance profile gives a single aircraft the ability to take off in confined spaces, transition to efficient forward flight and remain on station long enough to support complex ISR patterns or extended perimeter security missions.
Sasi acknowledged the risks of a tilt‑rotor tricopter which introduces a single mechanical point of failure in the tilting mechanism, but argues the trade is essential to meet real operator needs. “Operation should always drive technology, not the other way around,” he explained. Customers operating in urban and low‑acoustic environments cannot afford noisy, draggy designs that broadcast their presence and burn through batteries.
One of Karshak’s high‑altitude test campaigns proved the value of the drone’s architecture. Troops liked the endurance of traditional gas‑engine platforms but hated the noise that announced their presence kilometers away. Karshak’s challenge became delivering “silent endurance” with electric systems that could compete with fuel energy density through better aerodynamics, power distribution, and structural efficiency.
More Drones Designed for Extreme Environments and Missions
Whereas Karshak optimized the Shark Hawk as a fast, quiet scout, Shark Hawk VTOL R and the twin‑engine fixed‑wing address endurance and survivability at the extremes.
The Shark Hawk VTOL R concept targets high‑altitude and coastal theaters (think: 3,000–4,000 meters above sea level and harsh maritime weather) where standard Group 1 systems struggle with air density, icing and buffeting winds.
The twin‑engine fixed‑wing, by contrast, serves as what Sasi calls a “mothership,” acting as a communications relay or high‑persistence ISR node with four to five hours of endurance depending on payload. In disaster response or wide‑area security operations, that endurance allows continuous overwatch without the constant landing and relaunch cycles that interrupt situational awareness.
2026 Outlook: From Group 1 to Heavier and Higher
As Karshak looks toward 2026, the roadmap extends beyond today’s sub‑7 kg Group 1 platforms into heavier Group 2 systems capable of carrying 3–5 kg payloads for defense and offshore energy missions. The company is eyeing potential cases including resupply and inspection on offshore oil rigs, where a single tugboat sortie can cost thousands of dollars and take hours to reach a platform that a capable drone could service far more efficiently.
Longer term, Sasi hints at ambitions in the “higher” direction: near‑space stratospheric platforms that act as agile “trucks to the sky,” carrying small communications or imaging payloads without waiting for national launch providers to schedule rideshare slots. The idea is to offer a responsive, reusable layer between satellites and low‑altitude drones, suited for science campaigns, comms relay or wide‑area sensing.
Regulatory environments will shape how quickly these visions manifest. In India, beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) and certification frameworks are still emerging and often draw heavily from data and standards developed in the United States, Europe and other mature markets. Until full regulations arrive, much of Karshak’s clients’ advanced work continues under exemptions, special approvals and test corridors. Even so, Karshak stands ready with platforms that reflect robust engineering and accountability practices.
North America, Canada and Harsh‑Weather Validation
Karshak’s next strategic phase involves international expansion. Company leaders have started this deliberately with Canada, as both a market and one of the toughest validation environments in the world. Extreme cold, vast distances, remote communities and critical infrastructure stretched over enormous geography make it an ideal testbed for an ecosystem built around resilience and endurance.
“If we can make our system work there, it almost works everywhere,” Praneetha observed, pointing to the alignment between Canada’s regulatory sophistication and its harsh operating conditions.
Karshak is also engaging with the broader North American ecosystem through participation in upcoming events such as AUVSI XPONENTIAL in Detroit and Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas, while continuing to support major shows in India.
How to Learn More
For operators, integrators and policymakers interested in field‑ready autonomy rather than lab‑only demos, Karshak positions itself as a partner focused on both performance and accountability. Praneetha emphasized that the team is “always open to thoughtful conversations,” particularly with organizations thinking seriously about responsible deployment of autonomous systems in demanding environments.
Visit Karshak’s website to explore its services across agriculture, defense and government, rail and transport, and industrial inspections, along with updates on the Shark Hawk ecosystem and upcoming events. Connect with the team via LinkedIn and other public channels – or reach out directly at info@karshakdrones.com to discuss real‑world problems, collaborative R&D or pilot deployments in high‑stakes domains.
As Praneetha aptly framed it, “The future of autonomy is not about who builds the most advanced system, but who builds systems that can be trusted when assumptions fail—sometimes repeatedly, under real pressure, by real people.” In 2026, that may be the most important performance metric of all.