Aerospace Firm With India Ties Raises $11M, Scouts Factory Locations 

Chavda Law Group is the presenting sponsor of Global Atlanta's India Channel. Subscribe here for monthly India newsletters.

An aerospace manufacturer that seeks to help solve parts backlogs and tap into growing momentum in the U.S.-India aviation and defense trade has raised $11 million and started scouting locations for a potential factory. 

Georgia is in the running for the plant, which should materialize in the next six to 12 months. Greenfield investment and acquisition are both on the table, says JEH Aerospace founder and CEO Vishal R. Sanghavi. 

“I have a bias toward Georgia,” laughed Mr. Sanghavi, who moved his family from India to Johns Creek when the company decided to be structured as a U.S. firm with an Indian subsidiary that thus far has seen most of the action. 

When searching initially, traditional American aerospace and corporate hubs like Seattle, New York and Los Angeles felt too saturated — and expensive for a company that had yet to book revenues. 

“It’s a difficult place, in my view, to set up a new shop,” he said of these markets.

Mr. Sanghavi’s wife, who works in tech, also wanted a time-zone overlap with Europe and India. Atlanta was a “great hub and well-connected everywhere,” with a major Indian diaspora, he said. 

All that said, JEH’s future U.S. factory location will depend on factors like incentives, workforce and, crucially, customers, Mr. Sanghavi told Global Atlanta in a telephone interview. 

For now, meanwhile, JEH is operating its facility in Hyderabad, the southern Indian city where Mr. Sanghavi and his co-founder, Venkatesh Mudragalla, worked on joint ventures Tata Aerospace struck with Boeing, which makes Apache helicopter fuselages there, as well as Lockheed-Martin, which operates an adjacent factory sourcing empennages (tail wings) for its Marietta-made C-130 cargo planes. 

JEH’s high-tech, 60,000-square-foot factory is outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment for prototyping, testing and full production, underpinned by a software-based approach to manufacturing that Mr. Sanghavi says keeps costs in check while ensuring the precision required by regulators and OEMs. 

“We are end-to-end digital, from purchase order to parts,” he said. 

In the 18 months since its seed round led by General Catalyst, the company has secured $100 million in contracts and built out a crack team — all in India save Mr. Sanghavi and a few others in the U.S. so far. 

“We have now a strong 100-member team of operators, engineers and leaders together, and these people are some of the top aerospace talent you will find in India,” he said.

India has a glut of engineers graduating from its institutions each year, he added, but they’re not necessarily well-versed in aerospace, so JEH is recruiting top industry leaders even as it creates customized training for new entrants through its Center for Skills and Center for Resilience. 

Mr. Sanghavi said the time is ripe for a new industry partner that can bridge supply-chain gaps in the complex aerospace sector, where leading manufacturers have been battered by external pressures in recent years. 

With the Boeing 737 Max crashes and COVID-19 in the late 2010s and early 2020s, “the demand went down and then it shot back up — the demand-supply gap became further and further expanded,” he said. 

Massive backlogs have only grown as air travel has exploded in the post-pandemic era, while trade wars add another element of unpredictability. (India is currently in the Trump administration’s tariff crosshairs over its purchases of Russian oil). 

Mr. Sanghavi said JEH is focusing its efforts on serving the tier-one and tier-two suppliers of components like engines, helping boost their efficiency. 

The process begins with outsourced production of components, with an eye toward becoming a value-added engineering partner once trust is established. 

“The engineering and the manufacturing are so deeply intertwined, and unless you have strong engineering, you’re unable to do good manufacturing,” he said.

To do so, he says the company is set up to benefit from the particular advantages of the “U.S.-India corridor,” offering a middle approach between the extremes of outsourcing fully and bringing everything back to the U.S. Somewhere in the middle, he said, lies a huge competitive advantage that his former employer, Tata, has already proven. 

“We as JEH Aerospace can bring the best of both worlds — it is not an ‘either/or’ but an ‘and’ solution,” he said. 

The Tata Group owns flag carrier Air India, which was privatized in 2022. But the largest carrier in India, Mr. Sanghavi said, is IndiGo, with about two-thirds of domestic market share by passengers and a fleet of more than 360 aircraft. Earlier this year, the IndiGo Ventures fund included JEH Aerospace in its inaugural round of investments.  

The company’s tech-integrated approach also helped woo the $11 million Series A investment led by Elevation Capital. 

“What impresses us most is their ability to combine cutting-edge technology with deep manufacturing expertise, creating a solution that the global aerospace supply chain desperately needs,” said Ashray Iyengar, principal at Elevation Capital, in a news release. “We’re excited to partner with Vishal and Venky as they set new standards for how aerospace components are made.”

The Pendleton Group is the presenting sponsor of Global Atlanta's Economic Development Channel. Subscribe here for monthly Economic Development newsletters.