Zen Technologies Limited

Zen Technologies sells the Indian armed forces something an ordnance factory cannot: repetition. The Hyderabad company was founded in 1993 to build computer-based training systems for defence and police users, floated on the Bombay Stock Exchange in 2011 and joined the National Stock Exchange in 2015. Four business lines now sit under one roof. Training and simulation is the oldest and still the anchor, and it breaks into live ranges, live simulation, virtual simulation and a Combat Training Centre package that ties the other three into instrumented exercises for whole formations. The live range products turn an ordinary firing point into a scored one, and they run from the ZEN STS smart target system with LOMAH scoring and the Multi-Functional Target System through tank targets, a master control station for range officers, the ShootEdge system and containerised ranges that arrive on a truck instead of being built in place. Live simulation covers force-on-force training with TacSim and the Armour Combat Training System, plus a hand grenade trainer for the HE36 pattern. Virtual simulation is the deepest catalogue of the four. It reaches from small arms trainers such as AWeSim and the Infantry Weapons Training Simulator through mortar, grenade launcher and air defence trainers to crew gunnery and driving simulators for the T-72, T-90 and BMP-II, and on to driving trainers for army trucks and civil buses.

The counter-drone line arrived later and grew faster. ZADS combines radio frequency detection, radar and electro-optical cameras with jamming, and Janes reported in 2023 that Zen had won Indian Ministry of Defence orders worth roughly 3.47 billion rupees covering twenty ZADS units alongside sixty-nine driving simulators for Ashok Leyland Stallion trucks. A hard-kill configuration adds a gun to the sensor chain. That work pulled Zen into remote controlled weapon stations, now a line of its own, covering Parashu for the 7.62 mm medium machine gun, the tank-mounted Fanish in 12.7 mm, the naval Sharur, the Hawkeye surveillance turret, the Durgam rugged artillery camera and Prahasta, a quadruped robot that can carry a small-calibre weapon. A four-barrel rotary machine gun built for drone swarms belongs to the same family. Digital beamforming modules for phased-array work round out the catalogue.

Growth has come partly by purchase. Zen took majority control of the electronic warfare and communications firm Unistring Tech Solutions in 2019, then from 2024 added stakes in AITuring Technologies for electro-optics and robotics, Applied Research International for marine and naval simulation, Vector Technics for unmanned aircraft propulsion, TISA Aerospace for loitering munitions and Anawave Systems for naval training. Production runs from Maheshwaram near Hyderabad and a plant in Himachal Pradesh. Buyers are mostly Indian, spanning the Army, Navy, Air Force, central armed police forces and state police organisations, with export business in Africa and Southeast Asia.