Preparing For Lift-off

With new technology and falling costs, space-tech startups in India are gaining ground with domestic and global clients.

- HaricHandan arakali

Bellatrix Aerospace, a space technology startup in Bengaluru, has its roots in a project that co-founder Rohan M Ganapathy had worked on while at college in Coimbatore. In his second year of aeronautical engineering, he had visited Nasa in the US and had been exposed to the concept of electric propulsion for satellites as against the conventional chemical-burning ones.

Back home, Ganapathy started building an electric thruster—with a grant of `20 lakh from JSW Steel— hoping it would help him leapfrog into a doctoral programme after his engineering degree. He graduated and, by 2015, built a proof-of-concept version of the thruster, called microwave plasma thruster. That year, he co-founded Bellatrix with his friend Yashas Karanam, an electrical engineer, and the venture was incubated at the Indian Institute of Science’s (IISc) Society for Innovation and Development in Bengaluru.

This June, Bellatrix announced that it had secured $3 million in pre-series A funding from a clutch of investors led by venture capital (VC) firm IDFC-Parampara, and including the Munjal Group and actor Deepika Padukone’s KA Enterprises. One of the reasons investors found Bellatrix attractive was because it’s the only venture in India to have a development contract from Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) for its microwave plasma thruster, says Jatin Desai, general partner at Parampara Capital.