“Everyone else had PhDs in their subjects, and we were not even electronics students. But we didn’t want to lose the opportunity," Jayakumar says. They are going to be iDEX entrepreneurs-in-residence at Forge, building a monitoring system that will map the health of a soldier. “We will be connecting the squadron and the control base, so a commander will always know the strength of the soldiers," says Vineet. The defence ministry is reportedly planning to spend ₹13,000 crores in the next five to seven years to modernize the armed forces. A fraction of that will go towards innovation with programmes like iDEX. But it may have already seeded an ecosystem of defence startups. After all, at least 44 high tech projects are off the ground.