Spacetech startup Digantara raises $10 Mn led by Peak XV Partners and Kalaari

Spacetech startup Digantara has raised $10 million in Series A1 funding led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India) and Kalaari Capital.

Global Brain, a Japan-based venture capital firm, Campus Fund, and the founders of IIFL Wealth also participated in the round. In 2021, the company raised a seed round of $2.5 million from Kalaari Capital.

The fresh capital will help Digantara deploy the first phase of its surveillance satellite constellation, the company said in a press release. It will also deploy the capital towards accelerating the development of its downstream space situational awareness (SSA) service, with an aim to offer a comprehensive suite by Q2 2024.

Founded in December 21018, Digantara describes itself as a space situational awareness company that intends to enable sustainable and safer space operations by building a comprehensive infrastructure powered by its multi-modal data pool. 

According to the company, inadequate tracking capabilities of objects in Earth’s orbit has left 96% of the 1 million objects that are currently in orbit untracked and these objects are large enough to cause damage to spacecraft but small enough to go undetected.

"We will invest heavily in launching our space tech infrastructure to track previously unobservable objects and significantly increase data points. This will empower stakeholders with comprehensive insights for efficient decision-making in an increasingly complex space environment." said Anirudh Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Digantara.

The company recently expanded to Singapore and also commenced the development of India's first commercial SSA optical observatory in Uttarakhand. This observatory will play a crucial role in enhancing the nation's space and SSA capabilities, according to the company. The firm recently launched two missions that served as the space weather testbed.

Over the past few years, several space tech startups such as Agnikul Cosmos, Skyroot Aerospace, Bellatrix, GlaxEye, Dhruva, SatSure, Vesta Space and InspeCity have managed to raise decent funding.

Earlier this month, Pixxel raised $36 million in a series B funding round from new investors such as Google, while Skyroot scooped $51 million in September last year.

Digantara is a five-year-old company but has remained at a pre-revenue stage in the fiscal year ending March 2022. It barely made Rs 16 lakh in operating income in FY22, while its losses stood at Rs 73 lakh. The rise in losses can be attributed to a drastic jump in employee benefits and legal-professional costs.