A four-year-old space tech startup company from India, Skyroot Aerospace, has raised $51 million in a Series-B financing round. This is by far the biggest funding round ever in the Indian space-tech sector. The funding round was led by GIC, a global investment firm headquartered in Singapore.
Other participants such as ‘Myntra’ and ‘CultFit’ founder Mukesh Bansal, ‘Greenko Group’ founders, Anil Chalamalasetty and Mahesh Kolli, Google board member Ram Shriram’s ‘Sherpalo Ventures’, Solar Industries India Limited, Neeraj Arora (former WhatsApp Global Business Chief), Wami Capital, along with the existing investors participated in the funding round.
Skyroot will use the funds to expand its space engineering team, which currently has close to 200 employees.
Thrilled at the future prospects, Naga Bharath Daka, co-founder and COO of Skyroot said: “The funding would help the company get to a full-fledged commercial satellite launch scale within a year from now. It has started booking payload slots for its upcoming launches.”
Skyroot Aerospace is the first startup to ink a memorandum of understanding MoU with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which consequently led to India’s first privately-developed space launch vehicles. It was established by former ISRO engineers Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharat Daka in 2018 with the aim to address the demand from the international small satellite market.