Pawan Chandana: The ISRO Scientist Who Quit and Built India’s First Space Unicorn

The Boy Who Failed Math

Here is a detail that almost never makes it into a founder profile, because founders usually leave it out themselves. Growing up in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, Pawan Kumar Chandana once scored 51 out of 100 in mathematics.

Not a typo. Fifty-one. The subject that, decades later, would underpin every orbital calculation, every thrust-to-weight ratio, and every fuel mixture decision behind India’s first privately built rocket to touch space.

He passed that exam, eventually got into IIT Kharagpur, and went on to earn a Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering with a Master’s in thermal science and engineering. But the early stumble is worth sitting with for a second, because it sets up everything that follows. Pawan Chandana’s story was never about being the most naturally gifted person in the room. It was about a specific, almost stubborn kind of persistence that shows up again and again at every major turning point in his career.

Five Years Inside India’s Space Programme

In September 2012, Pawan Chandana joined ISRO as a scientist at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram. He joined ISRO in 2012, driven by his strong interest in rockets and exploring space.

For the next five years, he worked on some of the most consequential hardware in India’s space programme. He helped develop the GSLV Mk-II, one of the largest launch vehicles ever built in the country, and worked as a systems engineer on the booster rocket for the GSLV Mk-3. Eventually he was named Deputy Project Manager for the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, a position most engineers in India’s space establishment would consider a career milestone, not a stepping stone.

It is worth pausing here on what that job actually represented. ISRO is, by most measures, the most secure and prestigious employer an aerospace engineer in India can land. Steady government salary. National pride attached to every mission. Decades of institutional credibility. Pawan Chandana had all of it by his late twenties.

The Decision Everyone Around Him Thought Was Reckless

In 2018, Pawan Kumar Chandana did something most engineers in India would call career suicide. He resigned from one of the most coveted jobs in the country, a scientist’s role at ISRO, with no startup experience, no investor network, and no guarantee that what he was about to build was even legally possible.

Private rocket companies barely existed in India. The policy framework didn’t support them. The investors didn’t understand them. And yet, Pawan Chandana walked out anyway.

Why? Pawan Chandana soon decided he actually wanted to establish a global space technology business. That is the official version. The more honest version, the one that comes through in his later interviews, is simpler and a little more vulnerable: he had become convinced that building something of his own would be more fulfilling than continuing to operate within someone else’s mission, no matter how prestigious that mission was.

On June 12, 2018, he co-founded Skyroot Aerospace in Hyderabad alongside Naga Bharath Daka, a fellow ISRO scientist who had reached a similar conclusion at roughly the same time. The company started with a team of ten people. No grand office. No government contract waiting on the other side. Just two engineers betting their careers on the idea that India needed, and could build, its own private launch vehicle industry.

Finding the First Believer

This is where most Indian deep-tech founders hit the wall that ends their company before it ever begins: nobody wants to fund rockets. Hardware is slow, capital-intensive, and unforgiving of mistakes. There is no MVP you can ship in six weeks. There is no quick pivot if the thrust-to-weight ratio is wrong.

Pawan Chandana resigned from ISRO with no investor network, and found his first investor by cold-messaging on LinkedIn.

Read that sentence again. The man who would go on to build India’s first space unicorn started his fundraising journey the same way thousands of unfunded founders try and fail every year: sliding into someone’s inbox with no warm introduction and no track record to point to.

The company’s first significant backing came from entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal, who invested $1.5 million in the venture. Bansal, the co-founder of Myntra and Cult.fit, was not an obvious early backer for a rocket company. But he said yes. The renewable energy company Greenko Group subsequently supported the startup as well.

It was the kind of early capital that does not make headlines but makes everything else possible. With it, Skyroot Aerospace quietly went to work on the unglamorous, invisible engineering that nobody outside the company would see for years: solid rocket propulsion stages, hypergolic upper-stage engines, carbon composite manufacturing processes built entirely in-house.

Proving It, One Engine Test at a Time

Between 2020 and 2021, Skyroot Aerospace ran a sequence of firsts that, taken individually, looked like small technical milestones. Taken together, they were the foundation of an entire industry being built from zero.

In July 2020, the company tested Raman-1, a hypergolic-fuel upper-stage engine, becoming the first Indian private enterprise to test this engine type. In December 2020, the company successfully test-fired India’s first privately made solid rocket propulsion stage, designed and built entirely in-house, using a carbon composite structure with a fully automated manufacturing process that achieved weight savings of up to five times versus steel.

The same month, the company tested the Kalam-5 solid-fuel rocket engine, named after former President and aerospace scientist A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. Then, in May 2022, came a full-duration test of the Kalam-100, the engine that would eventually power Skyroot’s flagship Vikram launch vehicles.

The Government of India had liberalised the country’s space sector in May 2020, opening the door for exactly the kind of company Skyroot Aerospace was trying to become. In September 2021, that liberalisation translated into something concrete: Skyroot Aerospace became the first Indian startup to formally access ISRO’s facilities and expertise, signing an agreement with the Department of Space to test its rocket systems and subsystems using the country’s own space infrastructure.

November 2022: The Moment It Became Real

Every founder story has a moment where private conviction becomes public proof. For Pawan Chandana, that moment arrived in November 2022.

Skyroot launched Vikram-S, a suborbital rocket, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. It was India’s first privately developed rocket to reach space, and it instantly made Skyroot the most recognisable name in India’s nascent private space industry.

“That’ll be a major milestone for us,” Pawan Chandana told CNN of the moment. “Very few companies globally are able to make it to orbit yet.”

What that launch did, beyond the technical achievement, was change the conversation around Skyroot from “an interesting experiment” to “a company that has actually proven it can build and fly a rocket.” Investors who had been watching from a distance started paying closer attention. Talent that had been hesitant to leave secure government and corporate jobs started applying.

Building the Infrastructure Nobody Sees

Public rocket launches get headlines. The years of infrastructure-building in between do not, and that is exactly where most of Skyroot’s actual work happened between 2023 and 2025.

In 2023, the company unveiled MAX-Q, described as India’s largest private integrated rocket development facility, built near Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport. Skyroot also signed agreements with the Telangana state government to establish dedicated private rocket manufacturing, integration, and testing facilities.

During this period, the company continued refining its Kalam engine series, with successful tests of the Kalam-5 and Kalam-100 motors that the company has described as among the largest privately developed rocket stages ever tested in India. A 2023 funding round valued the company at $519 million, a number that, in hindsight, was simply the midpoint of a much longer climb.

Vikram-1: Carrying the Weight of an Entire Industry

Vikram-1 is not just Skyroot’s next rocket. It is the vehicle that, on successful launch, becomes India’s first privately developed orbital rocket, full stop.

The specifications reflect years of accumulated engineering decisions. The rocket is built with approximately 95% indigenous components, uses lightweight carbon composite structures, and incorporates 3D-printed liquid engines. It is designed to carry payloads of 300 to 350 kilograms into low Earth orbit and up to 260 kilograms into sun-synchronous orbit.

The path to launch was not a straight line. Initial plans for a 2024 launch slipped, then slipped again, with the company eventually targeting a window between February and March 2026, pending final clearances from the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre. In April 2026, Skyroot shipped the first Vikram-1 unit from its Hyderabad headquarters to Sriharikota for final testing.

Speaking to BusinessToday ahead of the launch, Pawan Chandana reflected on the distance travelled:

“When we started Skyroot, the ambition was simple, to build a global spacetech company from India. From uncertainty around our first funding to now being backed by global investors and supported by the government’s push for deep tech, we are in a position to scale launches.”

The Unicorn Moment: May 7, 2026

Seven years after walking out of ISRO with nothing but conviction and a cold LinkedIn message, Pawan Chandana got the validation that very few deep-tech founders in India ever see.

On May 7, 2026, Skyroot announced a $60 million funding round co-led by Sherpalo Ventures and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, with participation from BlackRock, Arkam Ventures, Playbook Partners, the founders of Greenko Group, and the Shanghvi Family Office. The round valued Skyroot at $1.1 billion, more than doubling its 2023 valuation, and made it India’s first spacetech unicorn.

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As part of the deal, Ram Shriram, founder of Sherpalo Ventures and a board member at Alphabet, joined Skyroot’s board, bringing with him decades of Silicon Valley pattern recognition for what a category-defining company looks like in its early years.

“We at Skyroot are excited about the upcoming Vikram-1 launch, India’s first private orbital rocket, marking a significant milestone both for India and the global space sector,” Chandana said. “This investment signals confidence from some of the world’s most reputed investors in Skyroot.”

Why Now: The Gap Nobody Else Is Filling

Pawan Chandana has been unusually direct about the structural opportunity Skyroot is chasing, and it is worth understanding in his own framing.

Speaking at Arkam Ventures’ annual meet in March 2026, he called the current moment a “once in a lifetime opportunity” for India’s spacetech sector. His reasoning rests on a simple supply gap: roughly 219 private rocket launches were expected globally in 2025, but only 33 of them were serviced by private providers outside of China and SpaceX. That leaves a significant chunk of global satellite operators with nowhere reliable to turn.

At the same time, the market itself is shifting underneath everyone’s feet. Small satellites now account for more than 75% of all global launches, a category that rewards exactly the kind of nimble, dedicated, lower-cost launch vehicle that Skyroot Aerospace has spent seven years building. According to Arkam Ventures’ 2026 estimates, India’s space sector could grow from roughly $13 billion today to nearly $40 billion by 2030.

Pawan Chandana’s read on India’s place in that growth is measured rather than triumphant: “We may not surpass countries like the US or Russia, but India will definitely play an important role globally.”

What Comes Next

The fresh capital from the unicorn round is earmarked for increasing Vikram-1’s launch cadence, scaling up manufacturing, and accelerating development of Vikram-2, a heavier one-tonne class launch vehicle powered by an advanced cryogenic upper stage capable of serving a larger segment of the global satellite market.

Skyroot now employs over 1,000 people, a striking expansion from the ten-person founding team that started in a Hyderabad office in 2018 with $1.5 million and a conviction nobody else shared. The company has been formally recognised with a National Award for its work, and Pawan Chandana himself was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2020, years before most of the world had heard of Skyroot Aerospace.

The Quiet Lesson in All of This

There is a version of this story that gets told as pure triumph: ISRO scientist quits, builds unicorn, becomes India’s Elon Musk. That version is not wrong, but it skips the part that actually matters for anyone trying to build something hard.

Pawana Chandana did not have an obvious advantage when he started. He struggled with the exact subject his entire career would later depend on. He left a secure, prestigious job for an industry that did not legally or financially exist yet in India. He raised his first meaningful capital not through a network of contacts but by messaging a stranger on LinkedIn. He spent years on engineering milestones that nobody outside a small circle of engineers cared about, long before there was a rocket on a launchpad to show for it.

Disclaimer: This article has been written using the most current publicly available information as of June 2026. If you find any information incorrect or outdated, please email us at corporate@ceovine.com and we will rectify it promptly.