SEBI v. DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations Limited and others (misleading announcements and IPO fund misuse, 2025)

Judgment entered

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 8, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, in a single reading of the order; an independent second reading of 60 SEBI records agreed on every field for 56, the four misses being penalty amounts. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.

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In November 2025 SEBI found that a drone-training company listed on the BSE SME platform and its promoters made misleading announcements, overstated revenue and profit, and diverted IPO proceeds. It restrained six noticees from the market for one or two years and imposed penalties totalling Rs 75 lakh.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

7.5m INR

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars. This regulator states penalties in INR. The figure is recorded as published and is not converted, so it does not appear in the USD totals or medians used elsewhere on this site.

What is alleged to have happened

A SEBI quasi-judicial authority, Santosh Shukla, issued this 105-page order on 28 November 2025 against ten noticees. They include DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations Limited, listed on the BSE SME platform since December 2022; its promoters Prateek Srivastava (managing director) and Nikita Srivastava (director and chief financial officer); an advisory firm, Instafin Financial Advisors LLP, and its partner Sandeep Ghate; a supplier, Micro Infratech Private Limited; and an auditor, a merchant banker and employees.

SEBI investigated the company for 2022-23 and 2023-24 and alleged a fraudulent scheme: misleading corporate announcements, inflated revenue and profit in the financial statements, misuse of IPO proceeds, omissions in the prospectus, undisclosed related-party dealings and wrong shareholding disclosures. It alleged that Instafin, Mr Ghate and Micro Infratech helped, the last by issuing fictitious or inflated bills for Rs 5.90 crore.

The order concludes that the company and the two promoters made false and misleading announcements after listing to induce purchases and hold up the share price so that pre-IPO investors could exit, inflated income and profit for 2023-24, diverted IPO funds away from the stated objects without shareholder approval, and gave incorrect disclosures on deviation of IPO money. It finds that Instafin and Mr Ghate aided the scheme and that Micro Infratech aided the misuse of funds through inflated bills. It notes there was no evidence of concerted action among all the noticees, and takes a lenient view of two employees.

The restraint from the securities market runs for two years for the company, both promoters, Instafin and Mr Ghate, and one year for Micro Infratech. The penalties are Rs 10 lakh on the company, Rs 20 lakh each on the two promoters, Rs 10 lakh each on Instafin and Mr Ghate and Rs 5 lakh on Micro Infratech, Rs 75 lakh in all, with a bar on selling assets until penalties are paid. No disgorgement was sought.

The operative directions name only these six noticees, so the record does not show any sanction on the auditor, the merchant banker or the other two named noticees. It does not show whether anyone appealed, whether the penalties were paid, or any investor loss figure.

This library tags the matter as misleading issuer disclosure. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the order.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Misleading issuer disclosure — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2025-11-28 SEBI final order

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• SEBI order

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added October 8, 2026. submit a correction.