Flight is entering a new era, one where it is cleaner, faster, and radically more accessible. BluJ Aerospace Private Limited, founded in 2022 and headquartered in Hyderabad, is at the forefront of this transformation, building next-generation VTOL aircraft that redefine how people and cargo move through the air. A deep-tech aviation company focused on sustainable air mobility for commercial and defense applications, BluJ designs and manufactures autonomous cargo platforms and hydrogen-electric and battery-powered passenger VTOLs that remove the need for conventional airport infrastructure while dramatically reducing travel time and emissions. Its flagship platforms — BluJ Reach, a fully autonomous cargo VTOL with a 100 kg payload and ranges of 50 km (battery) and 250 km (hydrogen-electric), and BluJ Hop, an eight-passenger hydrogen-electric VTOL enabling regional connectivity up to 600 km — reflects BluJ’s vision of scalable, safe, and climate-conscious aviation.
BluJ Aerospace actively advances India’s ‘Make in India’ mission while collaborating with leading players across logistics, defence, and the public sector. Guiding this vision is Maruthi Amardeep Sri Vatsavaya, co-founder and CEO, an accomplished aerospace technologist with over 17 years of experience spanning rockets, aircraft, and high-growth startups. A founding team member and former director of engineering and manufacturing at Skyroot Aerospace, he played a key role in developing India’s first private launch vehicles, Vikram-S and Vikram-1. His earlier work at global OEMs such as General Electric and Collins Aerospace involved advanced aircraft engines, structures, and composite systems. Under his leadership, BluJ Aerospace has raised $2.25 million in venture funding and government grants, delivered full-scale VTOL prototypes, and built a high-performance engineering organisation — steadfastly pursuing a single ambition: to make flying simple, sustainable, and transformative.
Excerpts
What inspired you to start BluJ Aerospace and focus on VTOL in India?
The inspiration came from a simple but persistent problem: regional transportation is fundamentally an access problem, not just a capacity problem. For decades, the solution has been to add more aircraft and build more airports, but that approach doesn’t scale well for a country like India. Large parts of the country still remain poorly connected despite decades of aviation growth. We believe VTOL technology changes that equation entirely. By removing the dependency on large runways and enabling point-to-point operations, VTOLs unlock a completely new model of regional connectivity. What makes this moment critical is that advances in composites, electric propulsion, autonomy, and now hydrogen are finally converging, making VTOLs technically and economically viable. India, with its diverse geography and infrastructure gaps, is uniquely positioned to benefit from this shift.
How did your background shape BluJ Aerospace’s vision for sustainable air mobility?
Both my co-founder, Utham Kumar Dharmapuri, and I bring over 18 years each in the aerospace industry, with experience across organisations like Boeing, GE, Collins Aerospace, and Skyroot Aerospace. That background shaped our approach at BluJ — combining aerospace-grade quality and safety with the speed and pragmatism of a start-up. This balance enabled us to build and publicly fly India’s first eVTOL technology demonstrator in a much shorter timeframe than far better-funded peers. More importantly, it helped us chart a practical, step-by-step roadmap toward sustainable air mobility, grounded in real engineering, certification, and operational realities.
What makes BluJ’s VTOL technology stand out on the global stage?
BluJ’s core differentiator is a scalable, common VTOL architecture that underpins multiple aircraft variants, allowing us to evolve platforms without reinventing the system each time. This common architecture spans propulsion, avionics, flight control, and autonomy, improving reliability while accelerating development and certification. On efficiency, our focus is long-range VTOL operations enabled through hybrid propulsion, combining electric VTOL capability with significantly extended cruise endurance. From a safety and autonomy standpoint, we design redundancy and fault-tolerant control into the architecture from day one, with autonomy built incrementally to support safe, reliable operations as missions scale in complexity.
What are the main challenges in building hydrogen-electric and battery-powered VTOLs, and how is BluJ addressing them?
Designing both battery-powered and hydrogen-electric VTOLs comes with challenges around energy density, weight management, thermal control, and system reliability — especially in vertical flight where efficiency margins are tight. Batteries limit range, while hydrogen systems introduce complexity in storage, integration, and certification. BluJ addresses this by designing lightweight composite airframes, high-efficiency propulsion, and a common system architecture that supports both battery and hydrogen variants. We use batteries for near-term, shorter-range missions and hydrogen-electric hybrids to unlock long-range operations, allowing us to enter the market early while systematically de-risking advanced propulsion for the future.
What risks did you address while developing hydrogen-electric VTOLs?
The biggest unknowns were ecosystem readiness, certification pathways, and whether hydrogen technology could meet aviation-grade reliability. Rather than waiting for the ecosystem to mature, we chose to build in parallel. We formed early partnerships for hydrogen production and refuelling, while developing the core propulsion technology in-house. We’ve already built and ground-tested a 60 kW hydrogen-electric system, with a flight-ready next generation planned on our prototypes. On the certification side, we’re working closely with DGCA and have decoupled hydrogen certification from our battery VTOL programme, ensuring hydrogen doesn’t delay near-term market entry while we steadily de-risk the technology.
How do BluJ Reach and BluJ Hop VTOLs aim to transform urban and regional transport in India?
VTOLs will extend air access to regions that are not reachable by aviation today, fundamentally improving the speed and efficiency of logistics and passenger transport. For logistics, this means faster movement of goods and lower systemic costs. For passengers, it enables direct, point-to-point regional travel that avoids congestion and limited airport infrastructure.In India, where logistics costs are nearly 12% of GDP compared to about 8% in the US and China, achieving such efficiency gains requires new-age technologies rather than incremental improvements. VTOLs represent one of the core breakthroughs that can accelerate this transformation for both goods movement and human mobility.
How will hydrogen-electric propulsion shape India’s sustainable aviation goals over the next decade?
Hydrogen-electric propulsion offers a pathway to move aviation from incremental efficiency improvements to genuinely zero-emission regional flight. Over the next decade, it can enable long-range VTOL and short-haul operations without the range and lifecycle limitations of batteries alone. In India, this is tightly aligned with the National Hydrogen Mission and broader goals around energy security and import independence. Aviation is a hard-to-abate sector, and hydrogen provides one of the few scalable routes to meaningfully reduce emissions while continuing to grow air connectivity. As hydrogen production, refuelling infrastructure, and certification frameworks mature, hydrogen-electric VTOLs can play a critical role in decarbonising regional aviation while strengthening India’s domestic aerospace and energy ecosystem
How is BluJ supporting ‘Make in India’ through indigenous aerospace manufacturing?
BluJ contributes to ‘Make in India’ by owning the end-to-end design and development of its VTOL aircraft in-house across airframes, propulsion, and core systems. This includes design ownership of composite airframes, in-house electric motors, battery packs, hydrogen fuel-cell propulsion systems, as well as the flight computer and control software with autonomy developed internally. By retaining design ownership over these critical technologies, we reduce reliance on imported subsystems in strategically sensitive areas while building a domestic aerospace manufacturing base. Given the dual-use nature of our platforms across civil and defence applications, this directly supports India’s strategic interest in self-reliant aerospace capability.
How will autonomous aviation, AI, and smart cities reshape India’s transport landscape?
Autonomous aviation, AI, and smart city infrastructure together can transform mobility in India by shifting it from infrastructure heavy expansion to software driven access. Imagine a medical emergency in a tier two city or a remote district where road travel is slow and the nearest airport is hours away. An autonomous VTOL, integrated into a smart city network, can be dispatched automatically, using AI to optimise routing, manage airspace, and account for weather, cutting response times from hours to minutes. At a broader level, this same intelligence can be applied to everyday mobility, integrating VTOLs with existing road, rail, and metro systems to reduce congestion and improve reliability. For India, this intersection turns advanced air mobility into a practical public utility that quietly extends access, improves resilience, and connects people and regions that are otherwise hard to reach.
How do you balance innovation with safety and public trust in autonomous aviation?
In autonomous aviation, trust is built through discipline, not novelty. We balance innovation with safety by introducing new technology in controlled steps, validating it through extensive ground testing and supervised flight trials before increasing autonomy over time. We are starting with logistics applications, where autonomy can be proven without carrying passengers, allowing us to demonstrate reliability, safety, and operational maturity in real-world conditions. This approach also builds regulatory and public confidence. Interestingly, global surveys consistently show that public acceptance of autonomous aviation is higher than often assumed when safety and benefits are clearly demonstrated. By proving performance first and scaling responsibly, public trust follows.