In 2019, two BITS Pilani students started a satellite company at a time when India had almost no private space industry. Seven years later, Pixxel runs a six-satellite hyperspectral constellation, builds satellites for others, and in September 2026 closed a $100 million Series C co-led by Temasek and Seraphim, taking its total funding to $195 million. On Network Capital, I spoke with cofounders Awais Ahmed (CEO) and Kshitij Khandelwal (CTO) about how they got there and where they want to go next.
The early days
The idea took shape around 2017, while both founders were building a Hyperloop pod as students. Awais remembers how few Indian companies worked in space then. TeamIndus had reached the final of the Google Lunar XPRIZE and raised about half of the roughly ₹450 crore its lunar lander and rover needed, a shortfall Awais puts down to Indian capital being too thin for a mission with no clear commercial return. Bellatrix Aerospace, founded in 2015, was building propulsion systems, and Dhruva Space, founded in 2012, had gone quiet for a while.
Abroad, the picture looked very different. SpaceX had found its rhythm, and Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, BlackSky and Capella Space had shown that private firms could build and operate satellites. Kshitij points to February 2018, when Falcon Heavy flew and SpaceX landed its side boosters, as the moment reusable launch and falling launch costs became real. For Awais, a visit to SpaceX turned out to be transformational. He wanted to work in space for the rest of his life.
The founders chose to build for the world from the start. Communications already had Starlink and demanded far more capital, so they looked at Earth observation, which had moved from optical to multispectral imaging and then to synthetic aperture radar. Hyperspectral imaging was the missing step. Space agencies had flown hyperspectral instruments for science, yet no company sold the data commercially. Awais wrote to about 30 potential customers over LinkedIn and email, picking people quoted in news stories and press releases, and almost all of them said they would buy such data. Most were relying on drones, which limited how much ground they could cover.
Earning trust
I asked how two young founders with little funding persuaded customers to take them seriously. Awais credits clarity. A few rudimentary news stories had appeared from their Hyperloop days and from a planned entry to the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, but he doubts customers ever read them. What worked was telling each prospect exactly which satellites Pixxel planned to build, what problem the data would solve for them, and what Pixxel wanted in return.
The vision has held up remarkably well. Awais says the 2019 pre-seed deck already described analytics, satellite manufacturing and the constellation size Pixxel still targets today. Timelines have stretched by a year or two in places, partly because of COVID and supply chains, and partly because space hardware takes time when you are building things that have never existed.
Pixxel now sells three things. Kshitij explains that the demo satellites tested the core scientific assumption, hyperspectral imaging in a compact form, at the lowest possible cost, and the team learnt to make usable products from them before calibrating all six Firefly satellites in 2025. Aurora, which the company began building in 2020 and 2021, lets customers task satellites, buy archive imagery, visualise data and build their own indices from hundreds of spectral bands. Awais adds that AI now lets a non-specialist type a request, run an algorithm on an image and get a report explained in plain language. The third line is the missions business, for which Pixxel has modularised roughly 80 to 90 percent of its satellite components.
Setbacks
Pixxel’s first satellite, Anand, was due to launch on ISRO’s PSLV in February 2021. A day or two before shipping, final tests showed that components from one vendor had failed. ISRO, then chaired by K. Sivan, offered extra days, but replacing long-lead parts meant six to eight months of further work, and Pixxel had to withdraw from the launch.
I framed this as a question of legitimacy, the term management scholars use for how ventures win and keep the support of those who matter to them. Awais pushed back on the word. In his experience, customers and investors treat a delay as a disappointment and still see the company as credible. Employees understand that setbacks come with the business, investors know they are funding hardware, and early customers had already seen delays from other satellite data suppliers. Pixxel responded by explaining to each group why the delay happened and what it was doing about it. A month later it commissioned a second satellite, Shakuntala, to spread the risk across two spacecraft. Shakuntala launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-4 in April 2022 and Anand on PSLV-C54 that November, and both sent down data.
Kshitij names a second hard moment, the no-go call in 2024 that delayed the Firefly constellation by six months. It was expensive and stressful, and it changed the constellation’s trajectory. The satellites now image regularly, and he sees the decision as proof that the team could admit when something was falling short.
Crawl, walk, launch
The first three Firefly satellites launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-12 from Vandenberg Space Force Base on 14 January 2025, in the early hours of 15 January in India. The other three followed on SpaceX’s NAOS mission in August 2025, and each founder attended one of the two launches at Vandenberg. Kshitij recalls three years of work coming together, a team buzzing with optimism, and a clear rise in employee satisfaction scores. Awais describes a launch as the line that divides every space company’s history into before and after. For SpaceX that line came with its fourth Falcon 1 flight, which preceded a NASA contract worth more than a billion dollars. Pixxel won no such contract the next morning, but the launch brought relief and fresh motivation, for the team and for the families who had backed them when few people in India knew what a space company was.
Customers gave a different kind of confidence. Awais singles out a Fortune 500 company that signed with Pixxel when the startup was two or three years old, for a service it had yet to deliver. Government contracts mattered even more. The US National Reconnaissance Office awarded Pixxel a five-year hyperspectral contract in 2023 and a further contract in May 2026, NASA selected it for its Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition programme in 2024, and in June 2024 Pixxel signed the Ministry of Defence’s 350th iDEX contract to build miniaturised satellites for the Indian Air Force. For Awais, the world’s largest space spender buying from a company built largely by Indians, for data it could find nowhere else, proved the work would have impact.
Competition, policy and procurement
Awais sees a different set of competitors for each business. In hyperspectral data the field is global, with two or three serious rivals, and Pixxel’s edge comes from designing its own camera, the critical part of the technology, where most competitors contract theirs out. He puts it simply, saying a company cannot be world-beating in technology unless it owns its tech stack. In Indian satellite manufacturing, Pixxel has launched nine satellites, and he says the nearest rival has launched one smaller and less capable satellite.
The founders agree that policy has changed a great deal since 2019. The Union Cabinet approved IN-SPACe in June 2020, the government opened space to foreign direct investment, and, according to the founders, IN-SPACe now funds early-stage projects with around ₹1 crore each. The founders count more than 400 space companies in India today, spread beyond Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai to Ahmedabad, Delhi and Nagpur. Regulatory risk is lower and funding is easier to reach, though more competition means a founder’s story has to resonate with funders.
Procurement has moved more slowly. Awais describes L1 bidding, where the lowest qualifying bid wins, as squeezing Indian suppliers to near-zero margins, a different problem from the cost-plus contracting that inflated costs in the US. He would prefer critical contracts to reward the best combination of technical ability and cost. On manufacturing, he argues that a country of India’s size and ambition must design and build strategic technologies such as satellites, rockets, missiles and fighter jets at home, and that ISRO’s decades of work give private companies a supply chain to build on. Pixxel builds its own satellites in India because it is cheaper there, and it plans some work in the US and Europe for its global business.
Ambition
Awais leads everything outward facing, including fundraising, commercial work, analytics, legal and finance. Kshitij leads the space team, from mission engineering and payloads to production and image processing, and describes his role as keeping the gears turning. Senior leaders run finance, people and the US-based commercial organisation. The founders say their only real arguments are over satellite names. After a few years of trial and error, they enter difficult conversations focused on solving the problem and leave the question of fault aside.
The Series C funds the next phase. Kshitij’s target is more than 50 satellites a quarter by late 2028 or early 2029, from new factories in India, Europe and the US. Pixxel plans to add sensing modalities beyond hyperspectral within a couple of years and hopes to win a role in Artemis or Gaganyaan within three to four. Awais sees the playground widening from Earth to the Moon, Mars and the asteroid belt.
I closed by asking whether astronauts still matter even though a chunk of what they do fairly straightforward to automate. Awais recalled Shubhanshu Shukla visiting Pixxel’s office, after which everyone came away energised. Kshitij argued that exploration is incomplete without humans, citing Nikolai Fyodorov’s Philosophy of the Common Task and the idea, made famous by Fyodorov’s admirer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, that Earth is humanity’s cradle and that a civilisation must one day leave it.