O
n a January morning last year, a Falcon 9 rocket built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX lifted off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on a low Earth orbit mission. The payloads it was carrying included a surveillance satellite called SCOT, an acronym for Space Camera for Object Tracking, with the capability to track objects as tiny as 5 centimeters that was built by Bangalore-based Digantara Industries. The launch of what the company claimed was the world’s first commercial space surveillance satellite was hailed by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi as a milestone in a country that’s getting serious about space tech.
Fast forward to December, when the VC arm of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries led a $50 million series B funding round that valued Digantara at $200 million and increased the total funding it has received to $65 million. The firm’s cap table also includes other billionaires, commodities tycoon Kumar Birla and edtech entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala, both of whom invested in earlier rounds. The investors are flocking to get a piece of one of India’s hottest space-tech companies, which has evolved from offering the equivalent of a Google map for space to locate space debris into providing strategic intelligence services.
Led by its three cofounders, Anirudh Sharma, Rahul Rawat and Tanveer Ahmed, all alums of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list of 2025, Digantara is building a space surveillance system that can give early warnings of missile launches to countries across the globe. A network of satellites will be fitted with sensors to collect data about objects in space and paired with software analytics to provide intelligence about the movement and intent of those objects—crucial insights for governments to detect and respond to potential threats. “The world has realized that space domain awareness is 101 for space militarization,” says Sharma, 27, CEO of the firm, which was also featured on Forbes Asia’s 100 to Watch list of small companies and startups on the rise in 2024. “The timing of us starting this was pretty solid—right time, right place.
Our growth has been because of all the geopolitical instability we have seen, starting with the Russia-Ukraine war.” Satellite imagery, he notes, has helped shape military strategy.
Space will likely become a dangerous place, says the Center for Strategic and International Studies in its 2025 space threat assessment report. The American think tank wrote, “China and Russia, as well as, to a lesser degree, Iran and North Korea, are actively working to test new technologies and concepts of operations in space that have clear applicability and use for counterspace weapon capabilities.”
“The world has realized that space domain awareness is 101 for space militarization.”
Globally, space-security budgets are being ramped up. The U.S. Congressional Budget Office estimates President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system, could cost as much as $1.2 trillion over 20 years. The European Space Agency has carved out €1.35 billion ($1.6 billion) to strengthen the continent’s space capabilities. India, too, is doubling down. The country is expanding its spy satellite network and adding nighttime imaging to enhance its national security capabilities after encountering surveillance blind spots during last year’s conflict with Pakistan.
According to San Francisco-headquartered Grand View Research, the global market for space surveillance and threat detection is expected to rise to $2.4 billion by 2033 from $1.7 billion in 2025. “Deep technology of today is commercial technology of tomorrow,” says Pranav Koshal, vice president at Bangalore-based Kalaari Capital, one of Digantara’s early backers. Having governments as the biggest anchor customers may pose a revenue concentration risk but at the same time “if you can deliver, you can get long-term stability.”
Digantara scored its first government contract from Singapore to track space debris in 2022, then one from Thailand. Contracts from India and the U.S. were signed last year. Sharma says about 80% of its $5 million annual revenue for the year ended March 2026, was from government clients, with commercial satellite operators making up the rest. The Indian government is the biggest customer, accounting for the bulk of those contracts. With that client list, Sharma projects the company will be Ebitda-positive on an estimated $50 million in revenue by fiscal 2028.
The space-surveillance field is populated by American defense giants including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and emerging space-tech players such as Colorado-based True Anomaly, which in April raised $650 million in funding at a $2.2 billion valuation. But Sharma says Digantara’s end-to-end platform—from laser and electro-optical sensors built in-house to near real-time data generation and predictive analytics software—is a key advantage, helping bring down costs and keep its pricing competitive.
Digantara says it will use the $50 million raised from Reliance partly to expand its presence in the U.S., the world’s largest defense market. To comply with American national security regulations as a federal contractor, Digantara set up its U.S. operations as a separate company called Zenith Space Technologies in Colorado with a U.S. partner in 2024. Zenith is focusing on building next-generation satellites for tracking missiles and recently won a contract to provide that technology to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s SHIELD programs.
“Being in the U.S. market is very much necessary, otherwise we will be a decade behind what is happening in the world,” says Sharma, who sits on Zenith’s board. “Our team there primarily focuses on the intelligence and defense business. That gives us breathing room to innovate.”
Gaining Traction
Digantara Industries has raised $65 million in funding to build and deploy a space surveillance system.
Digantara also recently partnered with Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency, the procurement arm of the Ministry of Defence, which will use the company’s tools to monitor the country’s satellites. Digantara has plans to enter Europe later this year. Back in India, the company is focused on developing its capabilities beyond near-Earth to monitor the next frontier: the huge volume of space within the Moon’s orbit.
Sharma became interested in space tech while he and Rawat, now Digantara’s chief operating officer, were studying computer science at Lovely Professional University in the northern Indian state of Punjab. After talking with high school buddy Ahmed, who was studying aerospace engineering at the RV College of Engineering in Bangalore, and was involved with a student satellite program there, they decided to start one too. Sharma recalls writing hundreds of emails to satellite developers in search of a mentor and receiving only a handful of responses.
One was from the chief engineer of a South American space agency that was interested in expanding its U.S.-based supply chain to India. He helped the students design a satellite structure and Sharma, whose father works for India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation in Bangalore, knew a manufacturer in the city. Since they needed a name for the invoice to bill the client, Sharma registered Digantara Research & Technologies in 2018.
A year later, when a satellite with components provided by Digantara collided with space debris, the budding entrepreneurs decided to explore how lidar, or light detection and ranging sensors, used in robots and driverless cars, could be deployed in space to reduce the risk of collision. Encouraged by industry reps at a space conference they attended in Washington, D.C., in 2019, Sharma and Rawat decided to pursue the idea full-time. They dropped out of college at the start of 2020 and moved to Bangalore where Ahmed joined them after completing his undergrad studies.
“Being in the U.S. market is very much necessary, otherwise we will be a decade behind what is happening in the world.”
The trio, who according to local media reports, collectively own 27% of the company, secured a $15,000 government grant to build a systems prototype. But getting Digantara accepted into the Indian Institute of Science’s prestigious incubator program for deep-tech startups proved to be harder and took them three attempts. In late 2020, Indian army officers came calling, a visit that changed the course of the startup’s trajectory.
The military was surveying India’s deep-tech startup scene and the officers wanted to see the roadmap of the cofounders’ patented idea for a system of satellite-based lidar sensors to track objects in orbit. Their discussions led Digantara to think beyond simply mapping the position of objects to predicting their behavior and intent, says Sharma, admitting that the military intervention helped to crystalize the broader business opportunity.
Three funding rounds followed, which allowed Digantara to build and take its hardware and software stack to market. It launched the first of two sensor-equipped satellites in addition to a network of ground-based sensors in Chile, New Mexico and India to survey space debris for commercial customers. Edtech billionaire Screwvala, who invested in Digantara in 2025, says what drew him was the serious intent of the founders to build the business for the long term. “They have a global outlook and the ability to scale up,” he explains.
Presently, Digantara has one active satellite in space and plans to launch ten more over the next two years, including two purpose-built for missile warning and precision tracking. Going forward, the company will draw about 70% of its data from sensors in its satellite network, with the balance from ground sites, rolling out three more stations in Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Namibia. In addition to a 2,320-square-meter factory in Bangalore that can assemble five satellites at once, Digantara plans to build a larger complex in Andhra Pradesh state capable of six times the output.
“The space-tech sector is hot, but timelines get stretched. Sometimes technology doesn’t work in real life, sometimes facilities to launch it aren’t available, and sometimes even when the technology is ready, clients may want more time or evidence,” says Suhani Doshi, vice president of investments at Bangalore-based Mela Ventures, which has invested in Indian space-imagery company GalaxEye. “There is a high likelihood of delayed revenue, and it requires patient capital,” she adds.
Armed with their war chest, Digantara’s cofounders are on a global hunt to acquire smaller companies to strengthen their supply chain. “The solid goal for this year is to look at inorganic growth,” Sharma says, “mainly towards integrating technologies in adjacent areas [by] acquiring companies that can help us become a defense industrial complex.”
Space Race
I
ndia’s space sector, which accounts for about 2% of the global space market, is catching up and is projected to grow to between $40 billion and $45 billion in annual revenue over the next decade from $8 billion currently, according to the government's Press Information Bureau. Contributing to that liftoff is a raft of private companies that were permitted to enter the sector in 2020, prior to which it was strictly the government’s domain. The Indian Space Policy of 2023 that followed laid out the rules for private sector participation.
Today, India has close to 400 startups working across launch vehicles, satellites, propulsion systems, space-grade electronics, Earth observation and downstream applications. In May, Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace, founded by former scientists from the government’s Indian Space Research Organisation became the country’s first space-tech unicorn after raising $60 million at a valuation of $1.1 billion. These up-and-comers, Digantara included, are now key to India achieving its ambition of capturing 8% of the global space market by 2030. —M.M.