Indian startup Skyroot Aerospace raises US$51 million, led by GIC

INDIAN space-tech startup Skyroot Aerospace has raised US$51 million in a Series B funding round led by sovereign wealth fund GIC.

Following the investment, Mayank Rawat, managing director of GIC India Direct Investment Group, will sit on Skyroot’s board.

Skyroot has successfully built and tested privately developed cryogenic, hypergolic-liquid, and solid fuel-based rocket engines. Its shareholder base includes Google board member Ram Shriram’s Sherpalo Ventures, former global business chief of WhatsApp Neeraj Arora, and Indian entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal.

In a press statement on Friday (Sep 2), Skyroot said that the fundraising was the biggest funding round in India’s private space tech sector.

Pawan Kumar Chandana, co-founder and chief executive officer of Skyroot, said: “This round puts us on a trajectory of hyper-growth by funding all of our initial developmental launches, and enables building infrastructure to meet high launch cadence required by our satellite customers.”

Chandana went on to add that the four-year-old startup’s objective is to provide best-in-class rocket launch services, as well as affordable and reliable small satellite launches. It is planning a demonstrator launch to space this year.

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According to Naga Bharath Daka, co-founder and chief operating officer of Skyroot, the startup will use the funding from this latest round to organise a commercial satellite launch within a year, and has started booking payload slots for its upcoming launches.

Its flagship series of launch vehicles, the Vikram series rockets, are constructed with an all-carbon-fibre structure, and can launch up to 800 kg of payload to low orbit earth.