India’s Flying Taxi Startup The ePlane Company to Build Digital Twins with NVIDIA

IIT Madras-incubated startup The ePlane Company has announced it will create a digital twin of its electric air taxi, e200x, and use the NVIDIA IGX platform for onboard computing.

The electric aircraft developer is building India’s first electric vertical take-off and landing air taxi using NVIDIA Omniverse libraries. ePlane said it will use physics-based digital modelling to simulate aerodynamic interactions, flight conditions, autonomy systems, extreme weather and sensor failures before physical testing.

Satya Chakravarthy, Founder and CTO of The ePlane Company and an aerospace engineering professor at IIT-M, said they are not just building an aircraft but an ecosystem.

“Collaborating with NVIDIA allows us to blur the line between the digital and the physical. By validating our flight operations suite in NVIDIA Omniverse, we are effectively pushing the limits of the aircraft thousands of times in simulation so that we never have to in reality,” he added.

The digital twin will allow teams to test the aircraft across millions of virtual kilometres before its first flight. The aircraft will also use the NVIDIA IGX platform to integrate cameras and radars for onboard decision-making. This is to address challenges in modern aviation, including the need for pilots to maintain heightened situational awareness.

Tobias Halloran, Director of EMEAI Startups and Venture Capital at NVIDIA, said the company supports Indian startups with access to accelerated computing and AI infrastructure.

ePlane also plans to use NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation models and the NVIDIA Nemotron family of open models, including open weights, training data and development recipes, to support future work.

The company said the collaboration addresses validation challenges in electric aviation. It plans to treat the aircraft, sensors, and onboard computing as a single certifiable system. “This isn’t just a simulation, it’s a time machine for safety,” said Bakthakolahalan Shyamsundar, Principal Engineer for Avionics Systems and Autonomy at ePlane.

Meanwhile, Vishnu Ramakrishnan, SVP for Business Partnerships and AAM Strategy, said the company is laying the groundwork to certify advanced computing platforms for aviation use in India.