Made in Nepal: How GarudX Built the Country's First Indigenous Drone
The story of how GarudX founder Adarsha Raj Bhusal spent 8+ years and Rs1.2M in R&D to build Nepal's first original drone platforms — and why it matters for the country.
In 2018, a small group of drone enthusiasts in Kathmandu decided they were tired of waiting for someone else to build the drones Nepal needed. They would build them themselves. That group became GarudX. This is our story.
The Beginning: Tinkerers with a Mission
GarudX started as what most tech companies start as — a group of passionate people with more curiosity than capital. Founder Adarsha Raj Bhusal had been building and flying FPV drones since 2016, learning the craft through online communities, imported parts, and a lot of crashes. By 2018, he had a clear vision: Nepal didn't just need drone operators. It needed a drone manufacturer.
The reasoning was simple. Nepal's geography — 8 of the world's 14 highest peaks, extreme altitude variation, unpredictable weather, remoteness — creates challenges that generic Chinese-manufactured drones aren't designed for. Disaster response teams need payload delivery systems that work at 4,000m altitude. Hydropower companies need survey platforms that can navigate narrow gorges in high winds. The military needs reconnaissance assets that don't depend on foreign supply chains.
None of the available commercial platforms ticked all those boxes. So GarudX decided to build them from scratch.
The R&D Years: Rs1.2M and Thousands of Crashes
The first three years were brutal. GarudX invested over Rs1.2 million in research and development — money raised through commercial FPV cinematography work, which became the company's first revenue stream. Every rupee earned filming music videos, commercials, and corporate events went back into the workshop.
The development process was iterative and often painful. The first GX8 prototype destroyed itself spectacularly on its third flight — a resonance issue in the frame design that took 6 months to identify and fix. The first SkyDrop payload release mechanism failed in testing because the electromagnetic latch couldn't handle Nepal's altitude-induced temperature variation. These weren't small setbacks. Each one required fundamental redesigns.
What kept the team going was the clarity of purpose. Nepal needed this. And every failed test revealed something about Nepal's conditions that no Chinese R&D lab would ever discover.
The Nepal Police Deployment: Proof of Concept
In 2024, GarudX achieved a milestone that validated years of development: deploying a life-jacket drop system with Nepal Police for water rescue operations on the Bagmati River. The SkyDrop system — carrying life jackets and emergency flotation devices — became the first indigenously-developed drone payload system deployed in an official Nepal government operation.
This wasn't just a technical achievement. It was a statement about what Nepali engineering could do. The system worked in real field conditions, delivered by operators trained by GarudX, maintained by GarudX technicians. The entire supply chain was local.
The Nepal Police deployment opened doors. Government agencies, development organizations, and private sector partners started taking GarudX seriously not just as a service provider but as a technology company with original IP.
Building the NDRL: Creating the Talent Pipeline
Parallel to the product development work, GarudX was solving another problem: Nepal had no FPV drone talent pipeline. Importing skilled FPV pilots from overseas for every commercial job was expensive and unsustainable. Nepal needed its own community of skilled pilots.
The Nepal Drone Racing League (NDRL) was the solution. Founded by GarudX in 2021, the NDRL started with 24 pilots at a small event in Kathmandu. By Season 3 in 2024, it had grown to 64 pilots from 8 countries, with 200,000+ concurrent online viewers. Today, the NDRL community has 140+ active pilots, many of whom now work professionally in drone cinematography, surveys, and operations.
The NDRL wasn't just sport. It was talent development. And it was proof that Nepal could build world-class drone expertise from scratch.
The SkyReaper: Nepal's First Military-Grade UAV
The culmination of years of development work was the SkyReaper — Nepal's first indigenously-designed military-grade fixed-wing VTOL UAV. The SkyReaper features Jetson Nano AI for autonomous obstacle avoidance, a Pixhawk 6X flight controller, and a modular payload bay for reconnaissance, communication relay, or precision delivery.
The SkyReaper wasn't built by copying a foreign design. It was engineered from first principles by the GarudX team, informed by eight years of learning what Nepal's terrain and operational requirements actually demand. That's what "Made in Nepal" means in practice: not just assembling components, but solving Nepal-specific problems with Nepal-designed solutions.
Why It Matters
Nepal imports nearly everything it uses in technology — phones, computers, vehicles, machinery. Every rupee spent on foreign technology is a rupee that doesn't build local expertise, local jobs, or local economic resilience. GarudX is a small company in the grand scheme of things, but the principle it represents is important: Nepal can build original, world-class technology products.
The drone industry is at an inflection point globally. Autonomous systems are about to transform agriculture, logistics, infrastructure inspection, and defense. The question for Nepal is whether it will be a consumer of that transformation or a participant in creating it. GarudX's answer, built one drone at a time over eight years, is that Nepal can participate — and should.
