Hey folks, Kamayani here.
This is the issue I've found easiest to write cheerfully about, because this summer, space in India stopped revolving around just ISRO and as a country we're finally making strides in this space. (pun intended)
On 18 July, Skyroot put a rocket into orbit from Sriharikota, which made India the third country in the world, after the US and China, whose own private company has done that.
On 21 August, Pawan Goenka, the head of India's space regulator, said that ISRO will eventually stop making launch vehicles and 120 ISRO technologies have already been transferred to private companies, and that the government plans to hand the running of a brand-new launch centre to a private operator.
And on 7 September, Pixxel raised $100 million, the largest round an Indian space company has ever closed.
These three events happened within two months, which goes on to show how fast this industry is moving in India.
India's space economy is around $8.4 billion, about 2% of the world's, and the government wants it at $44 billion by 2033.
We have around 440 space startups, but only 18 hold IN-SPACe authorizations, and private investment has grown 6x since 2021-22, to $618.5 million by March this year.
The companies are further along than those numbers suggest, and three are worth knowing properly:
Skyroot
Started in 2018 by two ISRO scientists who left to build rockets on their own.
It flew a suborbital rocket in 2022 and an orbital one this July, and in between grew to more than 1,000 people with Hyderabad campuses that can build one rocket a month.
Pixxel
Started in 2019 by two students at BITS Pilani who needed better satellite images for a college project on crop health and found nobody made them.
It started by selling hyperspectral Earth-observation data, and it now sells the software that turns those images into decisions.
Digantara
Also based in Bengaluru, it tracks the objects in orbit so that satellites don't hit each other. (love how niche this idea feels)
It raised $50 million last December in a round that brought in 360 ONE Asset and Japan's SBI Investment as new investors, with Ronnie Screwvala among them, and is now expanding into missile tracking for defence.
Behind these, there is a long list: Agnikul in Chennai, which 3D-prints rocket engines, Dhruva Space in Hyderabad, which builds satellites and ground stations, and SatSure in Bengaluru, which turns satellite images into data that banks use to lend to farmers.
McKinsey and the World Economic Forum estimate the space economy could reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, from about $630 billion in 2023. Today the largest single player is SpaceX, and its biggest business is broadband, not launch.
The most famous rocket company in the world makes its money selling internet subscriptions, which feels strange to write, but it is true.
That is the game Pixxel and Digantara are already playing, where the rocket is the cost and the service on top of it is the business, and India's best companies worked that out early.
The hard part starts now.
Getting a space company off the ground is one problem but building the industry around it is a much bigger one.
That is still true of the industry as a whole.
India now has around 440 space startups, but a functioning space industry needs the layer underneath them ranging from specialised components, reliable suppliers and the testing and manufacturing capacity that take a technology from a prototype to something you can build every month.
A Parliamentary committee made the same point in March, noting that ISRO still depends on foreign vendors for some critical components and that supply-chain bottlenecks have delayed scientific missions and their recommendation was to lean on startups to close exactly these gaps.
The government has started building that base, with a ₹1,000 crore venture fund, a ₹500 crore Technology Adoption Fund, cheaper access to ISRO facilities, technology transfers and support for state-level manufacturing clusters.
So the question for the next few years is whether India can build a reliable industry of suppliers, test facilities and factories that dozens of upcoming companies in this space would need to take us forward.
You could join a company that is eight years old and just put a rocket into orbit, or one that began as a college project and now has NASA as a customer, and you would not need a rocket background for many of the roles, because what those companies are building next is their commercial side.
Somebody at Skyroot has to sell the next launch to Europe, somebody at Pixxel has to turn images into a product a mining company will pay for, and somebody has to sell satellite internet in the towns fibre never reached, a business Starlink, Jio-SES and Eutelsat OneWeb are all licensed for and none of them has been able to start.
The people already doing this look a lot like you.
IN-SPACe's chairman, Pawan Goenka, spent most of his career at Mahindra, and LAT Aerospace, the aircraft company Deepinder Goyal started, was co-founded with Surobhi Das, who ran operations at Zomato and later expanded Blinkit's markets and categories.
If you want a way in, look at Skyroot, Pixxel, Digantara, Agnikul, Dhruva Space and SatSure, and on the demand side at Starlink, Jio-SES and Eutelsat OneWeb.
