Peak XV leads $10 million Series A1 funding round of spacetech start-up Digantara

Bengaluru-based space situational awareness (SSA) firm Digantara Research & Technologies has raised $10 million in a Series A1 funding round to further develop its flagship Space-Mission Assurance Platform (Space-MAP), the company announced Tuesday.

The funding round was led by the venture capital and growth investing firm Peak XV Partners—formerly Sequoia Capital India—with participation from Kalaari Capital, Japan-based venture capital firm Global Brain, Campus Fund and the founders of IIFL Wealth.

Incidentally, this also happens to be Peak XV Partners’ maiden investment in the spacetech segment.

This new investment will allow Digantara to not only deploy the first phase of its space-based surveillance satellite constellation but also accelerate the development of its downstream SSA services with the aim to offer them in a comprehensive manner by the second quarter of 2024. The firm has an agreement with the government of Uttarakhand in this regard.

“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 co-founder & CEO of Digantara, Anirudh Sharma.

“The team at Digantara is working towards creating the most advanced SSA data collection infrastructure. We believe that this will lead to significant capability in the life cycle of managing satellites, which is a rapidly growing market,” said Shailesh Lakhani, the managing director of Peak XV Partners.

The company had earlier raised a seed round of $2.5 million from Kalaari Capital in 2021.

Since its inception in 2018, Digantara has been working on the development of end-to-end infrastructure to address the difficulties of space operations and traffic management through Space-MAP as a one-stop solution for space launches globally.

With offices in Bengaluru and Singapore, Digantara’s 30-member team comprises experts in the fields of astrodynamics, photonics and space weather.