This ex-IAF pilot and team want to modernise India’s defence and industrial security

As an Indian Air Force pilot, Chandan Singh Rathore often observed that emergencies would often overstress the systems meant to handle them. “Different systems don’t talk to each other,” he explains. “Sensors are not talking to the command centre, which is not talking to the person on the ground, who is not talking to the decision-maker.” 

Rathore realised this gap existed across military bases, refineries, airports and power plants—places where delay of even minutes can cost lives or huge losses. That insight sparked an idea and eventually led to the birth of CoreShield, a Delhi-based deeptech defence and security startup founded in 2023. 

The team

Rana joined hands with Rana Amit K Navin and Bhavya Kumar to bring together expertise across the defence forces, cybersecurity, and defence-tech software engineering.

After voluntary retirement from the forces, Rathore studied at IIM Bangalore, where he met Navin, a defence-tech engineer with over 15 years of experience working on aerospace and military systems in Europe and Singapore. Navin (CTO) says, “During classes, we were discussing what kind of integrated solution critical infrastructure really needs; that’s where the idea came from.”

They realised there was a need for strong cybersecurity skills as military systems handle very sensitive data. Enter Kumar, a former staff engineer at Palo Alto Networks who had also worked with Bank of America and Empower in the US; he joined them as the third co-founder. 

Hard fix

Across India, emergency systems work in silos, slowing down response times. “If someone [mischievous] walks into a bank, the system should detect it and alert the police with the exact location, but most places still can’t do that,” Rathore (CEO) says. Seeing this gap exist across defence and industrial sites, the founders built CoreShield to provide a unified, predictive threat-detection system.

CoreShield has built an AI-powered security platform that makes critical infrastructure sensors, cameras, thermal systems, seismic detectors, and audio sensors “smarter” and capable of recognising threats in real-time.

The Delhi-headquartered company has around 20 employees, with teams working across different locations because of ongoing customer trials. The startup is still in its R&D phase and is preparing for full deployment.

The technology

CoreShield’s main product, Pulse, is a Predictive Unified Enforcement System that gathers data from many types of sensors, cleans it, and uses AI to spot unusual activity in real time. It uses CNN-based (Convolutional Neural Network) models trained on different kinds of threat data to recognise patterns and raise alerts quickly. Pulse gathers data from camera feeds, thermal images, seismic and vibration sensors, as well as audio inputs.

However, CoreShield doesn’t manufacture sensors. Instead, it acts as a data acquisition and intelligence layer, making existing sensors smarter. “We let all the sensors talk to each other, and then AI does the work,” Rathore added. “The customer doesn’t care which device triggered it. They only want accurate alerts.”

A major differentiator is CoreShield’s contextual understanding. The system doesn’t rely on a single signal; it reads the full environment, including time of day, temperature, sound, and location, to make more accurate decisions.

How deployment works

As of now, CoreShield is serving only B2G clients, which include the Ministry of Defence and the Indian Armed Forces (testing phase), but B2B conversations are underway.

For defence clients like the Air Force, Army and Navy, everything has to run fully on-premise. “There is a strict no-data-out policy,” Rathore says, so CoreShield installs servers and IoT devices inside its facilities. For B2B clients, the system is deployed on the cloud and can be accessed through mobiles, laptops and even smartwatches.

“We haven’t signed B2B contracts yet,” Navin says, “We’re speaking to companies like jewellery chains and large manufacturers, but defence was our priority because validation there is toughest.”

Pricing and revenue outlook

CoreShield has an order book of about Rs 24 crore through iDEX defence contracts. Pricing depends on the size of the site and the number of sensors. “A small store may need around a crore a year, while an airport will be much higher,” Rathore says. For B2B cloud clients, costs vary based on the modules they choose.

The startup is currently raising a $4 million seed round, expected to close soon.

Competition and market landscape

Globally, companies like Palantir operate in similar categories, but Indian defence policies restrict sensitive infrastructure from using foreign systems. Kumar says, “Many competitors focus on one type of sensor. Or they focus on home security. We are building for B2G and B2B critical infrastructure with multiple sensors talking to each other.”

Rathore notes that the biggest challenges came from working in defence environments. Since everything is air-gapped, the team had to build the system fully on-premise with no data going in or out. It also struggled to get clean data to train the AI, finding enough GPU power, and had to deal with strict security rules that made deployment slow and complex.

The road ahead

Beyond Pulse, CoreShield is also building A-Sec Current, an AI-based data-loss prevention tool that stops companies from accidentally sharing sensitive information with LLMs like ChatGPT. 

“This tool will guard private or company data,” Rathore says. “If you enter restricted information into an AI platform, it will flag and stop your query.” The startup plans a full commercial rollout once its defence certifications are completed by the end of December 2025.

According to an IMARC Group report, the critical infrastructure security market in India is estimated at about Rs 50,000–55,000 crore for 2024–2025, and is projected to grow steadily at a CAGR of around 10% through the next several years. “We’re aiming to capture 2% [market share] in the next five years, hoping for cumulative revenue of Rs 1,300–1,400 crore,” Rathore says. 

The startup also plans to expand into oil and gas, refineries, and Middle East infrastructure.