Deepinder Goyal — the business leader who redefined food ordering and instant commerce with Zomato and Blinkit — is now targeting a challenge that has long plagued India: developing indigenous gas turbine engines. His new venture, LAT Aerospace, seeks to rewrite the script.
Sharing his high-flying ambitions on LinkedIn, Goyal said, "India has attempted making gas turbine engines previously. And we've reached close. At LAT, we need to cross the finish line."
To make this age-old dream a reality, LAT Aerospace is assembling a world-class propulsion engineering team in Bengaluru. The objective? To design and develop completely indigenous, light-weight, and efficient gas turbine engines for flight — all developed completely on Indian soil.
What differentiates LAT's effort, according to Goyal, is its unconventional approach to research and development. “We’re giving engineers the freedom to think, build, break, and repeat,” he explained. The startup is establishing a specialized R&D facility equipped with high-tech laboratories dedicated to combustion, turbomachinery, thermal management, and advanced materials — all to enable rapid experimentation and innovation.
Goyal emphasized the autonomy of the team as a game-changer: "This team will be guided by engineers. No standing around waiting for approval from 'business' folks. No dealing with chasing slides or meetings. Just direct problem solving, conducting bench tests, dealing with suppliers, building hardware from scratch — and driving the boundaries of design and physics daily."
LAT Aerospace's eventual goal is to create propulsion technologies capable of fueling STOL airplanes, UAVs, and remote connectivity platforms — technologies critical to increasing India's strategic and technological autonomy in aerospace.
The news has created a big stir in the Indian tech and aerospace space.
“This is massive! Building indigenous gas turbine engines has been a long-standing challenge for India, and LAT’s approach — engineers leading the charge, rapid iteration, and true R&D freedom — feels like the breakthrough mindset we’ve been waiting for,” commented a LinkedIn user.
Another industry commentator said, "This is a very bold and necessary step in India's aerospace capabilities. LAT's strategy of decentralizing decision-making and investing in fundamental infrastructure like turbomachinery and combustion labs demonstrates a profound understanding of what real innovation entails. If it succeeds, this could reorient India's place in the international aero-propulsion value chain."
Closing his post, Goyal issued a passionate invitation to innovators: “If you’ve ever built turbines, rotors, control systems — or anything close — and want to be part of something that could one day rewrite history, write to us at [email protected].”
This is not Goyal's first experiment with high-impact innovation. In the early part of this year, Blinkit rolled out a 10-minute ambulance pilot service in Delhi-NCR, a development that has already been life-saving. With emergency response times much quicker, patients in critical condition — from trauma cases to cardiac arrests — have been treated faster than ever before using conventional emergency services, demonstrating how logistics technology can be leveraged in meeting immediate healthcare needs.
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