Bengaluru: As college students, Awais Ahmed and Anirudh Sharma dreamt of meeting Elon Musk. Years later, they launched their homegrown satellites in a SpaceX rocket.
On 14 January, two Bengaluru startups—Pixxel, co-founded by Ahmed, and Digantara co-founded by Sharma–saw their satellites soar into space from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, US.
It was a groundbreaking first for both startups. Pixxel became the first private company in India to have its own constellation of satellites using a cutting-edge hyper-spectral frequency that allows observation of the Earth in over 150 bands. It’s a technology useful in sectors as diverse as agriculture and defence.
“When I first saw the visuals of Elon Musk’s satellites being integrated at the Space X facility back in 2017, I knew we had the same passion and determination to do something that has never been done before in space. That was the start,” said Ahmed, who founded Pixxel with Kshitij Khandelwal.
The Indian government’s 2020 space sector reforms sparked a startup boom.
Digantara Aerospace launched the world’s first commercial satellite – Space Camera for Object Tracking (SCOT) – for surveillance of debris as small as 5 cm orbiting the Earth to ensure safer space operations.
The launch of both satellites is a giant leap for India, which has only just begun to carve out its space in the $630 billion global space sector. In contrast, the Indian space economy is valued at $8.4 billion, and holds only a 2 per cent share of the global commercial space market.
But this narrative is set to change with the Indian government opening up the space sector to private players in 2020. It has resulted in an explosion of startups.
“Within a few years, we have over 200 startups in the country operating at different parts of the space sector value chain and doing amazing things,” said Ashwin Prasad, a research analyst at New Delhi’s Takshashila Institution, which undertakes research on space economics.
With the rapid rise of space tech startups like Pixxel and Digantare, the Indian space economy could reach a valuation of $100 billion by 2040, according to a report by a global management consulting firm.
“To develop any strategic technological capability, a country has to create and tap into a robust industrial ecosystem. Only such private-driven ecosystems can draw on the talent, resources and infrastructure in the most efficient way to maximise the potential for innovation. This is the thinking that has driven the recent growth of startups in the Indian space sector too,” Prasad added.
Hyperspectral imaging
Over 200 employees gathered at Pixxel’s three-storey headquarters in Bengaluru’s Hennur Bellary Road Layout on 14 January. The lift-off was live-streamed from California and they joined in the countdown. When their three satellites–called Fireflies—roared into space, cheers erupted across their office.
“Although the idea first sprouted in 2019, it took us the last 18-24 months to actually build these satellites,” said Ahmed. His favourite catchphrase to describe what his Fireflies do: “They’re like an MRI for the earth.”
“Fireflies will help the world see the unseen”
A phone camera cannot be used to scan a human body for internal bleeding. You need an MRI scan to detect the problem, he explained.
Fireflies do exactly that, but in space. The satellites scan the planet and help detect pollution levels, gas leaks, and even crop diseases that otherwise are invisible to the naked eye or standard cameras. They do this using a technology called hyperspectral imaging.
“We found that a lot of the time, it is difficult to identify the exact disease affecting a crop or point out where exactly a gas leak was happening or could happen in the future. Our satellites aim to provide timely insights about such problems in sectors like agriculture, mining, environment, and energy,” said Ahmed.
The Pixxel founders met in BITS Pilani, Rajasthan, while completing their Masters in Mathematics. They were part of the student satellite team on campus called Anant, and collaborated with ISRO scientists on multiple satellite projects.
During their second year of college, Ahmed and Khandelwal competed in SpaceX’s Hyperloop Pod competition competing with teams from all over the world. It allowed them to build a hyperloop pod that could travel in a one-mile-long vacuum tube. Ahmed and Khandelwal became one of the 20 finalists from 2,500 global teams.
Buoyed by their success, they zeroed in on the idea of building a startup that would develop satellites with hyperspectral imaging in 2019. Today, Pixxel is backed by Google and was lauded by Prime Minister Modi on Mann Ki Baat when they sent Firefly to space.
Ahmed gave the example of the 55 ‘methane bombs’ worldwide. These are fossil fuel extraction sites where future gas leaks could release methane equivalent to 30 years’ worth of all US greenhouse gas emissions. Once the satellites are stationed in space, they will be able to identify such sites, monitor the emissions in real-time, and detect when a gas leak could occur.
The company started with a team of just four people – two co-founders and two engineers. After the initial help with funding from BITS alumni, the team has grown to 225 employees today. So far, the company has signed around 65 clients including Rio Tinto, British Petroleum, and India’s Ministry of Agriculture, with some already paying for data from its demo satellites that were launched early last year. The startup plans to add 18 more satellites to the six it has already developed.
“Fireflies will help the world see the unseen,” Ahmed added.
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Space surveillance
“Unlike air traffic control systems that manage aircraft traffic, no similar infrastructure currently exists to support the space ecosystem.”
If Pixxel’s Fireflies want to diagnose the Earth, then Digantara’s satellites are looking to build ‘maps for space’. They are building satellites to track space debris that poses a risk to rockets and satellites orbiting the Earth.
In 2018, the year Sharma founded Digantara with Rahul Rawat, and Tanveer Ahmed, a piece of debris crashed into their satellite. It was carrying important components that the founders had to deliver to a South American agency.
“That loss sparked a question: What if we could track every object in orbit with unmatched precision? What if we could build maps for space?” said Sharma. That germ of an idea is now a reality. Digantara built and launched a commercial space-based surveillance mission, called SCOT, on the SpaceX Rocket.
“Even a slight nudge by a piece of debris to a spacecraft orbiting the Earth at over 25,000 km per hour could prove fatal”
According to the European Space Agency, there are approximately 29,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10 cm in space, and over 6,70,000 pieces larger than 1 cm. It doesn’t end there. There are more than 170 million pieces larger than 1 mm orbiting Earth. With more and more satellites taking off to space, the risk of the debris colliding into larger satellites is increasing.
In 2024 alone, a large fragment from a Chinese space mission fell over southern California. In another incident, a piece of space debris crashed through a two-storey home in Florida, later confirmed by NASA to have originated from the International Space Station; and several fragments of a SpaceX capsule were found on a farm in Canada.
“Even a slight nudge by a piece of debris to a spacecraft orbiting the Earth at over 25,000 km per hour could prove fatal,” said Sharma.
Back in 2018, the founders were only 19 years old. Sharma and Rawat were pursuing their undergraduate studies in engineering at Punjab’s Lovely Professional University when they heard of a satellite club their friend Tanveer Ahmed was running in his Bengaluru college under ISRO’s guidance. This inspired the duo to set up a similar club in their college and build a nano-satellite as their first project. Soon after graduating, the trio came together, and started attending conferences and writing papers on everything space-related.
In one such conference in Germany in 2018, they learned about how natural and artificial objects floating about in orbit could be monitored from space itself.
For five years, they delved deeper into the issue and uncovered significant gaps in tracking such orbital objects and the growing challenges of space traffic. The Society for Innovation and Development (SID) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru incubated them. With Rs 25 lakh grant money from IISc and another Rs 25 lakh from the government, Digantara embarked on a mission to ensure safer and more efficient space operations.
As of today, only 4 per cent of such objects are being tracked by satellites, said Sharma. Digantara’s SCOT – the world’s first commercial Space Situational Awareness (SSA) satellite – equipped with advanced optical sensors capable of high-resolution imaging, plans to change that. It detects and tracks these objects, some even as small as 5 cm, in the Low Earth Orbit.
“As space becomes increasingly congested and contested, data-driven solutions are essential to safeguard satellite operations. Unlike air traffic control systems that manage aircraft traffic, no similar infrastructure currently exists to support the space ecosystem. Digantara is building that foundational infrastructure layer to enable safer space operations,” said Shreyas Mirji, vice president, business and strategy at Digantara.
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Funding challenges
“Only those who have a nuanced understanding of space tech are willing to invest.”
Digantara and Pixxel are part of India Inc.’s dream of becoming a global space superpower. But funding for space tech startups is still a challenge, not just in India but the world over.
Funds for the space sector plummeted by 55 per cent in 2024 to $59.1 million from $130.2 million the previous year, according to data from market intelligence platform Tracxn. The drop marks the first such steep fall in at least five years.
According to Pixxel’s Ahmed, even today, Indian investors remain hesitant to commit significant funds to the private space tech sector.
“Only those who have a nuanced understanding of space tech are willing to invest. Currently, a large number of our investors are international,” said Ahmed.
Although Pixxel has cut deals with multinational companies in India and overseas, raising funds and building hardware in the beginning was a major challenge. During the first three months, the founders spent money on their own – although limited, as they had just graduated from BITS Pilani. After that, they reached out to the alumni of their college.
While the Indian government helped Pixxel with infrastructure – they launched one of their hyperspectral satellites called Anand onboard ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) in 2022 – they didn’t receive help with funding, Ahmed added. As of today, Pixxel has raised $95 million from M&G Catalyst, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Google, Lightspeed, Radical Ventures, and Accenture among others.
Space tech startups and experts have pinned hopes on the fresh draft of India’s first dedicated space law, which will be opened up for industry stakeholder consultations by March 2025.
Digantara too chose to be bootstrapped and work on the progress of the mission by investing self-generated funds in the beginning. They received seed funding of $2.5 million from Kalaari Capital in 2021. Since then, they have been able to raise total funding of $16.5 million over four rounds from prominent global investors, including PeakXV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India and SEA), Kalaari Capital, Aditya Birla, SIDBI, Global Brain Corporation, Campus Fund, among others.
Meanwhile, experts pointed out that among the 200+ space startups in the country, perhaps only around a dozen have received ‘considerable’ funding. “Compared to countries like the US and China, the size of the VCs and funding streams for the startups in India is much smaller. We have a long way to go,” said Prasad.
Space tech startups and experts have pinned hopes on the fresh draft of India’s first dedicated space law, which will be opened up for industry stakeholder consultations by March 2025.
“It will also be a strong signal to the investors. Also, since the ideal customer for space-based services is still the government, the Indian government should act as an anchor customer to the Indian space startups,” Prasad added.
The space tech companies have big plans.
Pixxel plans to map the Moon and asteroids and look for materials required to build settlements in outer space. Digantara wants to establish a hybrid network of surveillance systems in space.
“Four years ago, Digantara was just an idea, a fire sparked by failure. Today, we are rewriting the playbook of space navigation and laying the foundation of humanity’s trillion-dollar space economy,” said Sharma.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)