Digantara, which is an Indian space tech startup working on space situational awareness, has raised $10 million in a funding round led by Peak XV Partners. Peak XV Partners on Tuesday made its first official funding announcement since restructuring from Sequoia India, leading a $10 million series A funding round in Digantara.
This announcement marked Peak XV’s foray into the space-tech sector, which has over 50 unicorn startups in its portfolio. Digantara, reportedly will be using the funds to build its commercial space situational awareness satellites, as part of its infrastructure. The company is building what is essentially a map of all objects in space, which it seeks to offer to space-faring organisations globally, as a data-on-demand service. In the long run, once its service is fully operational, it will work as a traffic roadmap for orbits in space. The company is also seeking to expand its team and set up a new office in Bengaluru.
According to Anirudh Sharma, chief executive of Digantara, “Alongside expanding the team, the entire funding round will be used in building and deploying the first batch of our space situational awareness (SSA) satellites, which will have eight satellites in total. We’ll launch the first one some time this year, followed by the remaining seven within 12 months of the first commercial satellite launch. With this, we aim to commence commercial satellite awareness data operations after April next year.” He further said that the company will not need all eight of its own satellites to commence commercial operations.
He further added in his statement that,”Having our own SSA infrastructure will give us more independence operationally, but we already source satellite data from government-backed space agencies and commercial firms that already have satellites in space. This is akin to how Google sources traffic data for Maps, which gives us a vast amount of space data to analyse, track and offer to clients.”
Digantara is presently working with the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) to source satellite data, among others and is presently demonstrating its space analytics services to government and defence agencies of Singapore and the UK.
According to Shailesh Lakhani, managing director of Peak XV Partners, “SSA is a rapidly growing market, and explained the investor’s rationale by stating that the product “will lead to significant capability in the life cycle of managing satellites.”
Digantara’s latest round makes for an increasing number of international investors leading funding rounds in domestic space-tech firms. From this it can be said that India has become a compelling market for investors looking to put money into emerging space tech startups.