Skyroot Aerospace Success Story: India’s First Space-Tech Unicorn

In 2018, India’s private space sector did not exist. There was no dedicated regulatory framework for private launch vehicle companies, no space-tech venture capital ecosystem, and no precedent anywhere in the country for a company outside ISRO building and launching its own rocket. Two former ISRO scientists looked at that complete absence of infrastructure and decided it was an opportunity rather than a wall.

Seven and a half years later, that decision has produced India’s first space-tech unicorn. In May 2026, Skyroot Aerospace raised $60 million in a round co-led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sherpalo Ventures, pushing its valuation to $1.1 billion and its total funding raised to $160 million. The round arrived just weeks before the planned maiden orbital flight of Vikram-1, India’s first privately developed orbital launch vehicle.

Two Engineers Who Knew Exactly What The System Couldn’t Do

Pawan Kumar Chandana grew up in Visakhapatnam, in a household where, by his own account, academic setbacks were not treated as final verdicts. He had scored just 51 marks in mathematics in school, a detail he has returned to often in later interviews, not as false modesty but as a genuine marker of how far his relationship with the subject eventually travelled. Intensive preparation for engineering entrance exams changed that relationship, and Chandana secured admission to IIT Kharagpur in 2007, earning a dual degree in Mechanical Engineering. A NASA programme during his undergraduate years deepened an interest in space that had been forming since childhood, and in 2012, he joined the Indian Space Research Organisation as a scientist.

At ISRO, Chandana worked on marquee projects including the LVM3, the heavy-lift rocket nicknamed “Bahubali” that would later power India’s Chandrayaan missions.

“It was a masterclass in technical expertise and organizational synergy,” he has said of those years.

It was also where he met Naga Bharath Daka, a fellow engineer and IIT Bombay alumnus working as an avionics specialist at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. The two became friends, and over time, began asking a question that ISRO’s structure was not built to answer quickly: what would it take to make satellite launches commercially competitive, frequent, and accessible to customers ISRO’s own government-paced timelines could not serve.

Chandana had spent nearly six years inside India’s space programme by the time he left. He understood its engineering strengths intimately. He also understood, just as clearly, what it could not do at the speed a global commercial market was beginning to demand. On 12 June 2018, he and Naga Bharath Daka co-founded Skyroot Aerospace in Hyderabad, with a small founding team of ten, most of them fellow ex-ISRO engineers who believed enough in the idea to leave secure government careers for an Indian private space sector that, at the time, had no other company in it.

The name itself draws from Hindu mythology, the cosmic tree believed to connect heaven and earth. The mission statement the founders settled on was equally direct: to “Open Space for All.”

Learning Equity By Reading About It Online

The early years tested the founders in ways that had nothing to do with rocket science. Chandana had deep technical expertise and no startup experience whatsoever.

“Building a business from scratch was uncharted territory,” he has said. “There was no generational knowledge to bank on; everything had to be learned through firsthand experience.”

He did not know how term sheets worked. He learned what equity meant, in his own account, by reading about it online.

Capital was the most immediate constraint. Private rocket companies require enormous upfront investment, tolerate years of zero revenue, and operate in a field where a single launch failure can end a company outright, a risk profile that made most conventional investors cautious. Chandana reached out to entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal, the founder of Myntra, who agreed to meet and ultimately invested $1.5 million, giving Skyroot Aerospace its first real institutional lifeline. Talent was a parallel challenge: convincing experienced engineers to leave the stability of ISRO for an unproven startup in a sector with zero track record required a pitch built on conviction rather than evidence, since the evidence did not yet exist.

What did exist, from very early on, was a distinct engineering philosophy. In July 2020, Skyroot Aerospace became the first private Indian company to successfully test a rocket engine, the Raman-1, a cryogenic engine named after Nobel laureate C.V. Raman. The company built its entire approach around 3D-printed engine components and carbon composite structures, technologies that dramatically cut both manufacturing time and cost compared with conventional aerospace methods, an approach that amounted to a fundamental rethink of how rockets could be built at commercial scale rather than an incremental improvement on existing techniques.

India’s regulatory environment shifted in the company’s favour soon after. Reforms introduced in 2020 and 2021 opened private access to certain ISRO facilities and established a formal framework for private space participation under the newly created Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre. Skyroot became one of the first private Indian space companies to sign a framework agreement with ISRO under the liberalised policy, turning what had been an informal regulatory grey zone into an actual pathway to launch.

The Day India Joined A Very Small Club

On 18 November 2022, Skyroot Aerospace launched Vikram-S, a single-stage suborbital rocket, from ISRO’s Sriharikota launch range. Mission Prarambh, meaning “beginning” in Sanskrit, carried three payloads and validated roughly 80% of the technologies intended for the company’s orbital-class Vikram-1 vehicle.

The mission placed India in a club that, at the time, held only two other members: the United States, where SpaceX had achieved the equivalent milestone years earlier, and New Zealand, home to Rocket Lab. India now had a private company that had put a rocket into space, a first for the country and a proof point that the engineering philosophy Skyroot had bet on, carbon composites, 3D-printed engines, an India-built supply chain, actually worked outside a lab.

Building The Factory Before The Customers Arrived

Confidence in that proof point translated quickly into capital and infrastructure. Skyroot Aerospace raised a Series B round of roughly $51 million in 2022, led by GIC, followed by a pre-Series C round of about $27.5 million in 2023 led by Temasek, pushing cumulative funding close to $100 million and the company’s valuation to approximately $519 million.

In October 2023, Skyroot Aerospace unveiled what it described as the largest private integrated rocket development facility in India, a 60,000 square foot site near Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, built to house design, manufacturing, and testing infrastructure under one roof. The company followed that, in November 2025, with the inauguration of its Infinity Campus, a 200,000 square foot facility opened personally by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, engineered to design, manufacture, integrate, and test multiple launch vehicles simultaneously, with the capacity to produce one orbital rocket every month once fully operational.

Through 2024 and 2025, the technical milestones piled up in a sequence that reads almost like a checklist for an orbital launch campaign. The Kalam-250 second-stage solid rocket motor completed a successful 85-second static fire in March 2024. The Kalam-1200 first-stage motor underwent its first static test in August 2025. The Kalam-100 third-stage motor, featuring an advanced flex-nozzle thrust vector control system, completed a qualification test exceeding 102 seconds in April 2025. By February 2026, the company’s Dhawan-III engine, built for future reusable launch vehicle applications, completed a 145-second endurance static fire on an indigenous mobile test stand designed and built entirely in-house.

Each of these components feeds into Vikram-1, a four-stage small satellite launch vehicle with three solid boosters and a liquid upper stage, designed to carry payloads of up to 350 kilograms to low Earth orbit using a structure built with roughly 95% indigenous components. Its all-carbon composite airframe cuts structural weight by up to five times compared with conventional steel construction, while its 3D-printed Raman engines reduce engine weight by half and cut production time by an estimated 80% relative to traditionally manufactured equivalents.

Becoming A Unicorn On The Way To The Launchpad

The $60 million round that pushed Skyroot Aerospace to unicorn status in May 2026 arrived with backing that signalled something beyond domestic confidence. Alongside GIC and Sherpalo Ventures, the round drew participation from funds managed by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, along with the founders of Greenko Group, Arkam Ventures, Playbook Partners, and the Shanghvi Family Office. Ram Shriram, founder of Sherpalo Ventures and a longtime Alphabet board member, joined Skyroot’s board as part of the round.

“Access to space is one of the key challenges of our time,” Ram Shriram said, announcing the investment. “Skyroot Aerospace is building the foundational infrastructure for that future with the best cost-to-performance ratio in the orbital launch industry, and what the team has achieved is remarkable.”

Chandana framed the moment in terms of what comes immediately next rather than what had already been accomplished.

“We at Skyroot Aerospace 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,” he said. “This investment signals confidence from some of the world’s most reputed investors in Skyroot.”

The company has stated it expects to conduct four to six launches in the current financial year, depending on how the maiden Vikram-1 flight performs, with roughly a third of demand expected to come from domestic customers and the remainder from international markets including Southeast Asia, Japan, the United States, and Europe.

The Market Skyroot Aerospace Is Betting On

The opportunity behind that demand forecast is structural rather than speculative. Small satellites now account for more than 75% of all global launches, yet outside China and SpaceX, only a small fraction of planned private launches worldwide were actually serviced by private providers in 2025, a gap industry analysts attribute to limited launch capacity rather than limited demand.

India’s own space economy is currently estimated at $8 to $9 billion and is projected to grow to somewhere between $40 and $50 billion by 2030 to 2033, depending on the forecast, driven by satellite constellations, earth observation demand, and a broader global shift toward smaller, more frequent payloads rather than the large, infrequent launches that defined the previous era of space access.

Skyroot Aerospace is not alone in chasing that opportunity. Indian competitors including Agnikul Cosmos, Pixxel, Bellatrix Aerospace, and Dhruva Space are building in parallel across launch vehicles, satellite manufacturing, and propulsion systems, and nearly 400 space-tech startups now operate in India in total.

Globally, Skyroot Aerospace is positioned against established players like SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Firefly Aerospace, companies with longer track records but, in several cases, a less direct cost advantage on the specific small-satellite launch segment Skyroot has built its entire technology stack around.

Skyroot Aerospace has also begun building partnerships that extend beyond launch services alone. In June 2025, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with Axiom Space to explore integrated orbital and launch systems for future trips to Axiom’s commercial space station and other low Earth orbit destinations, a partnership aimed at connecting Skyroot’s upcoming launch capability with broader in-orbit infrastructure rather than treating launches as a standalone service.

Skyroot Aerospace is headquartered in Hyderabad, Telangana, and operates the Max-Q and Infinity manufacturing campuses, spanning a combined 250,000 square feet.