On 3 May 2026, a 190 kg satellite built by a five-year-old Bengaluru startup lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on a SpaceX Falcon 9, becoming India’s largest privately built earth observation satellite and the first spacecraft anywhere to fuse radar and optical imaging on one platform. Six weeks later, it was dead — knocked out by a geomagnetic solar storm before it ever reached full commercial service.
That satellite, Mission Drishti, belongs to GalaxEye Space, founded in 2021 by five IIT Madras graduates who had just lost a hyperloop competition to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The company had raised tens of crores of rupees, spent three years building a sensor no one else had flown, and watched its debut mission go dark within weeks of reaching orbit. What GalaxEye did next — and what it had already survived to get there — is the story of how a hardware startup in a capital-starved, failure-punished sector tries to turn a very public setback into a second, better shot.
Quick facts
| Company | GalaxEye Space Solutions Pvt Ltd, Bengaluru |
| Founded | May 2021 |
| Founder(s) | Suyash Singh (CEO), Denil Chawda (CTO), Rakshit Bhatt, Pranit Mehta, Kishan Thakkar — all IIT Madras alumni |
| Businesses | OptoSAR (fused optical + radar) satellite imaging; earth observation data-as-a-service |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹2.02 crore in FY25 (year ended 31 March 2025), up from ₹23.4 lakh in FY24, as per Inc42 Datalabs’ filing-based estimates, September 2026 |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹9.6 crore in FY25, on total expenses of ₹11.6 crore, as per Inc42 Datalabs, September 2026 |
| Listed | Private — not listed on any exchange |
| Market value / last valuation | Reported at roughly ₹489 crore (~$51 million) between January and June 2026, per unlisted-share tracker Unlistedzone’s reading of regulatory filings, September 2026 (not officially disclosed by the company) |
| Key shareholders or CEO | CEO Suyash Singh; investors include Speciale Invest, Mela Ventures, Rainmatter, MountTech Growth Fund – Kavachh, Infosys, and ideaForge |
What they do
GalaxEye builds small satellites that carry both a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensor and a multispectral optical camera on the same platform, then fuses the two images of the same patch of ground into one product — what the company calls OptoSAR. The pitch is simple: optical cameras cannot see through cloud or darkness, and India’s monsoon geography means large parts of the country are cloud-covered for months at a time; radar can see through both, but lacks the fine detail and colour information of an optical image. A satellite that captures both at once, of the same location, at the same moment, promises all-weather, day-and-night imagery without forcing a customer to choose. GalaxEye sells that imagery and the analytics built on it — as opposed to selling satellites — to defence, agriculture, insurance, infrastructure, aquaculture and disaster-response customers, as described on the company’s own site and in Forbes India’s account of Mission Drishti (Forbes India, undated 2026 feature).
The origin
The five founders did not start in space. Suyash Singh led Avishkar Hyperloop, a 40-member IIT Madras student team that in 2019 became the only Asian squad to reach the finals of SpaceX’s Hyperloop Pod competition — Elon Musk’s own contest, which the team did not win (Business Standard, “From hyperloop to orbit,” 2026; ACR IIT Madras news archive). That near-miss is the founding insight in miniature: the team had proven it could design and build genuinely hard engineering under a deadline, but the hyperloop itself had no near-term market in India. Earth observation did. Singh, chief technology officer Denil Chawda and three teammates — Rakshit Bhatt, Pranit Mehta and Kishan Thakkar — incorporated GalaxEye Space Solutions in May 2021, betting that the unsolved problem in Indian remote sensing was not better cameras but better fusion: getting radar and optical data off a single bus, calibrated to the same pixel grid, so a defence analyst or an insurance adjuster did not have to reconcile two different satellites’ worth of data taken hours or days apart (Business Standard, 2026).
The struggle years
GalaxEye’s first hard deadline was self-imposed and public: a debut satellite launch targeted for September 2023. It did not happen. CEO Suyash Singh later attributed the slip to “complications with component deliveries and testing” — the ordinary but brutal reality of building satellite hardware in India, where specialised space-grade components often have to be imported, qualified and re-qualified (SpaceInsider, 1 August 2024). By August 2024, when GalaxEye closed a $6.5 million round, the public target had moved to “mid-2025.” It moved again. The company used a December 2024 flight of its GLX-SQ payload — a scaled-down technology demonstrator, not the full satellite — aboard ISRO’s POEM-4 orbital platform to flight-validate its SyncFusion imaging electronics before committing the full-size satellite to a rocket, according to Speciale Invest’s own 2025 year-end portfolio review. That is roughly 30 months between the original launch date and the actual one — an unglamorous, multi-year slip that is the norm rather than the exception for first-time satellite builders, but a real cash-and-credibility drain for a company that had to keep raising money to survive it.
The second, sharper crisis came after the company finally reached orbit. Mission Drishti launched successfully on 3 May 2026. Within days, GalaxEye reported a deployment-related technical issue and let the tumbling spacecraft coast for roughly 18 to 20 days to recharge its solar panels naturally rather than force a risky recovery manoeuvre (TenNews, “After Drishti setback,” 2026). It looked, briefly, like the mission would be saved. Then a severe geomagnetic solar storm damaged the satellite’s integrated circuits; GalaxEye waited about three more days before concluding the link was permanently lost (TenNews, 2026; Inc42, “GalaxEye loses connection with Mission Drishti satellite,” 2026). A satellite the company had spent three years and its entire funding history building was gone roughly six weeks after reaching space (Unlistedzone, September 2026).
The turning point
The turning point is not the launch alone or the failure alone — it is the gap between what the mission proved and what it lost. Before 3 May 2026, GalaxEye was a five-year-old, pre-revenue satellite builder that had never put hardware in orbit under its own name. After the failure, the company said its Launch and Early Orbit Phase telemetry showed that 80 to 85 percent of the spacecraft’s onboard systems — deployment, onboard computing and communications — had been successfully flight-validated before the solar-storm anomaly hit in the mission’s final stage (Inc42, 2026). On one side of that turning point: no flight heritage, a constellation plan that still existed only on slide decks, and commercial imaging capacity that had reportedly been pre-booked by customers through April 2026 on a satellite that would never deliver it (TenNews, 2026). On the other side: real, if incomplete, proof that GalaxEye’s core fusion hardware works in space, an acquisition to close the gaps the failure exposed, and a public commitment to fly two more OptoSAR satellites within 24 months of the loss (Inc42, 2026). CEO Suyash Singh’s own framing captured the reset: “the mission has provided invaluable engineering insights that will directly strengthen our future missions” (Inc42, 2026).
The money behind it
GalaxEye’s funding built up in four disclosed rounds. It raised a $3.5 million seed round in December 2022 (eoPortal satellite-missions database, 2026), then $6.5 million in a Series A round in August 2024 co-led by Mela Ventures with participation from Speciale Invest, Rainmatter, Navam Capital, Faad Capital and Anicut Capital — a round in which listed drone maker ideaForge separately took a minority equity stake of ₹8.28 crore, tying its own SAR-payload ambitions to GalaxEye’s sensor work (SpaceInsider, 1 August 2024). A $10 million extension followed in November 2024, led by MountTech Growth Fund – Kavachh with Infosys, Speciale Invest, Mela Ventures, ideaForge and Samarthya Investment Advisors also participating (SpaceInsider, 7 November 2024; India Entrepreneur, 2026). A further ₹44.2 crore (reported as roughly $4.8 million) came in as an extended Series A in March 2026, from existing backers Mela Ventures, Rainmatter, MountTech, Speciale Invest and a set of smaller angel funds and individuals (Inc42, “Exclusive: GalaxEye raises ₹44 Cr,” 2026). Taken together, GalaxEye’s own disclosed rounds sum to roughly $24-25 million since 2022; Inc42 separately put cumulative funding at about $27 million as of its September 2026 reporting, while unlisted-share tracker Unlistedzone estimated cumulative capital raised at approximately ₹212 crore (about $22 million) based on regulatory filings — the range reflects different cut-off dates and how each tracker treats the StarOps acquisition, rather than a real dispute over any single round (Inc42, 2026; Unlistedzone, September 2026).
Three backers stand out for what they changed, not just what they wrote in cheques. Speciale Invest, a deep-tech-focused fund, backed GalaxEye from the 2022 seed round through the 2026 extension, giving the company a consistent space-sector investor willing to follow on through a public satellite failure — its own 2025 portfolio review discusses GalaxEye’s POEM-4 test flight as a milestone, not a footnote (Speciale Invest, “Looking back at 2025,” 2026). ideaForge’s minority stake linked GalaxEye to an already-listed, revenue-generating drone company, opening a joint push to build SAR payloads for ideaForge’s own unmanned aircraft — a second commercial channel for GalaxEye’s sensor IP beyond satellites (AccessHub Space, 2024). And MountTech Growth Fund – Kavachh, a defence- and national-security-focused growth investor, led the larger November 2024 round; Singh himself credited MGF-Kavachh’s “deep expertise in defense and national security startups” as complementary to GalaxEye’s technology at “a pivotal stage” (India Entrepreneur, 2026). GalaxEye’s valuation is not officially published, but Unlistedzone’s filings-based reconstruction put it at roughly ₹105 crore across 2022-24, ₹248 crore across mid-to-late 2024, and roughly ₹489 crore in the January-June 2026 window that includes the Drishti launch and failure — a valuation path that kept climbing on paper even as the satellite it was built around stopped transmitting (Unlistedzone, September 2026).
How it makes money
GalaxEye’s stated model is data-as-a-service: rather than selling satellites or hardware, it plans to sell subscription and one-off access to fused SAR-optical imagery and the analytics layered on top, priced by area, revisit frequency and processing level, for customers who cannot get equivalent all-weather coverage from purely optical constellations (company website, galaxeye.space, 2026; Wellfound company profile, 2026). The unglamorous part people get wrong is that a data-as-a-service earth observation company does not really start earning until it has enough satellites in orbit to promise a useful revisit time — a single working satellite can only image a given spot once every day or so at best, which is not competitive for time-sensitive uses like disaster response or crop-damage assessment. That is why GalaxEye’s roadmap has always been a constellation, not a satellite: a five-satellite plan announced in November 2024 had grown to a stated ambition of ten satellites by 2030 around the time of the Drishti launch, and was revised again, after the failure, to a 30-satellite target by 2030 under the company’s “Gen-II” plan (SpaceInsider, 7 November 2024; TenNews, 2026). Until that scale exists, GalaxEye’s near-term revenue comes from pilot data contracts, government and defence evaluation programmes, and pre-booked imaging slots of the kind it says were reserved on Drishti through April 2026 before the satellite was lost (TenNews, 2026) — commercially real, but a fraction of what a functioning constellation would generate. The company has also started selling adjacent hardware capability: its August 2026 acquisition of spacecraft-bus maker StarOps brought in qualified satellite bus platforms across the 50 kg, 150 kg and 250 kg classes, which GalaxEye can now use both for its own missions and, potentially, as a supplier to others (Business Standard, 10 August 2026; YourStory, August 2026).
The numbers
GalaxEye’s public financial disclosures are thin, as is normal for a five-year-old, deep-tech company that only began recognising meaningful revenue recently; earlier years are not separately disclosed in the filings-based trackers reviewed for this piece, so the table below covers the two fiscal years for which figures are available rather than inventing a longer run.
| Fiscal year (₹ crore) | Revenue | Total expenses | Net profit/(loss) |
| FY24 (year ended 31 Mar 2024) | 0.23 | not separately disclosed | not separately disclosed |
| FY25 (year ended 31 Mar 2025) | 2.02 | 11.6 | (9.6) |
Revenue grew about 761 percent year-on-year, from ₹23.4 lakh in FY24 to ₹2.02 crore in FY25, while total expenses rose 73 percent to ₹11.6 crore, leaving a net loss of ₹9.6 crore for FY25 (Inc42 Datalabs, September 2026). Set against that, the company had by then raised roughly $24-27 million cumulatively (see funding section above) — meaning FY25 revenue was equal to a low single-digit percentage of lifetime capital raised, which is unremarkable for a company that spent FY25 building and testing its first flight article rather than selling data at scale.
Where the money comes from
GalaxEye’s own public materials list defence, agriculture, insurance, aquaculture, infrastructure and disaster response as target segments for OptoSAR data, but the emphasis is not where an outsider might expect. Forbes India’s account of Mission Drishti describes defence — specifically night-time operations and strike support, where an all-weather sensor has obvious military value — as the primary near-term application, with agriculture (monsoon-season crop monitoring), insurance (damage assessment) and aquaculture (site tracing) named as secondary markets (Forbes India, 2026). That is a mild surprise for a company whose most-repeated public pitch has been about India’s monsoon blocking optical satellites from watching its farms: the earliest paying interest, on the evidence available, has skewed toward defence and national-security customers rather than agri-tech, which tracks with a defence-focused fund, MountTech Growth Fund – Kavachh, leading the company’s largest disclosed round (SpaceInsider, 7 November 2024). No public source reviewed for this piece discloses an actual revenue split by segment or geography — GalaxEye has said its near-term focus is domestic, India-first, before any international expansion (SpaceInsider, 7 November 2024) — so that split should be read as stated target markets, not audited revenue attribution.
The risks
The clearest risk is not hypothetical: it already happened. A single geomagnetic solar storm destroyed GalaxEye’s only orbiting satellite roughly six weeks after launch, a reminder that small satellites without radiation-hardened components at every stage remain vulnerable to space weather that is, by definition, outside any company’s control (TenNews, 2026; Inc42, 2026). A repeat event on a Gen-II satellite would be a second and much harder credibility blow. Second, GalaxEye’s timeline discipline has a real track record of slipping — a September 2023 target moved to mid-2025 and then to May 2026 for the first satellite, and the company’s own post-failure plan now targets two more launches within 24 months and a Gen-II satellite in 20 to 24 months from a June 2026 development start (SpaceInsider, 2024; TenNews, 2026); further slips would extend the pre-revenue period during which the company is spending roughly five times its revenue in expenses, as FY25’s numbers show. Third, GalaxEye competes for capital and customers against better-funded Indian earth observation peers — Pixxel has raised close to $96 million and SatSure over $27 million, both ahead of GalaxEye’s disclosed $24-27 million — in a domestic regulatory environment still maturing under the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre’s 2024 authorisation framework, which governs how private satellite operators are licensed and supervised (CBInsights-sourced competitor funding figures via public search aggregation, 2026; press coverage of IN-SPACe’s May 2024 norms).
The takeaway
The transferable lesson from GalaxEye is not “space is hard,” which is obvious, but that in a hardware business built around a single point of failure, the right measure of progress is not whether the first unit survives — it is how much of the underlying system gets validated regardless. GalaxEye lost its satellite and, by its own account, still walked away with proof that 80 to 85 percent of the hardware worked, a strategic acquisition to close the remaining gap, and investors who wrote further cheques after the failure rather than before it. For a founder in any capital-intensive, physical business, the discipline worth copying is separating “did the mission succeed” from “did we learn what we needed to learn to make the next one succeed” — and being honest, in public, about which of the two actually happened.
Frequently asked questions
What does GalaxEye Space actually build?
GalaxEye builds small satellites that combine a Synthetic Aperture Radar sensor with a multispectral optical camera on one platform, fusing both images into a single all-weather, day-and-night earth observation product it calls OptoSAR, sold as a data service to defence, agriculture, insurance and other customers (company website, galaxeye.space, 2026).
What happened to GalaxEye’s Mission Drishti satellite?
Drishti launched successfully on 3 May 2026 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, but suffered a deployment issue and then permanent damage from a geomagnetic solar storm roughly six weeks after launch, after which GalaxEye lost contact with it for good, while stating that 80 to 85 percent of its onboard systems had already been flight-validated (Inc42, 2026; TenNews, 2026).
How much funding has GalaxEye raised, and is it profitable?
GalaxEye has raised roughly $24-27 million across a 2022 seed round and three Series A tranches through March 2026, according to Inc42 and other trackers; it remains loss-making, reporting a ₹9.6 crore net loss on ₹2.02 crore of revenue in FY25 (Inc42, “Exclusive: GalaxEye raises ₹44 Cr,” 2026; Inc42 Datalabs, September 2026).
Who founded GalaxEye and when?
GalaxEye was incorporated in May 2021 by five IIT Madras graduates — Suyash Singh, Denil Chawda, Rakshit Bhatt, Pranit Mehta and Kishan Thakkar — who had previously worked together on the Avishkar Hyperloop team that reached the finals of SpaceX’s 2019 Hyperloop Pod competition (Business Standard, 2026).
What is GalaxEye doing after the Drishti satellite failure?
The company started developing a “Gen-II” satellite in June 2026, acquired spacecraft-bus maker StarOps in August 2026 to build more of its hardware in-house, and has said it plans two further OptoSAR satellite launches within 24 months, working toward a stated goal of a 30-satellite constellation by 2030 (TenNews, 2026; Business Standard, 10 August 2026).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Business Standard, “From hyperloop to orbit: The IIT alumni who want to see through clouds,” 2026
- Business Standard, “Space startup GalaxEye puts world-first OptoSAR satellite into orbit,” May 2026
- Business Standard, “GalaxEye acquires Bengaluru-based StarOps spacecraft engineering firm,” 10 August 2026
- eoPortal, “Drishti Constellation (GalaxEye)” satellite-missions database, 2026
- Forbes India, “How GalaxEye’s Mission Drishti can shore up defence and agriculture,” 2026
- SpaceInsider, “GalaxEye Raises $6.5M in Series A Funding to Launch First Satellite,” 1 August 2024
- SpaceInsider, “GalaxEye Raises $10M to Accelerate Launch of Multi-Sensor Satellite for Defence and Civil Applications,” 7 November 2024
- AccessHub Space, “GalaxEye Space secures $6.5M funding to launch first satellite and advance multi-sensor technology,” 2024
- India Entrepreneur, “Spacetech Startup GalaxEye Raises USD 10 Mn Led by MountTech Growth Fund,” 2026
- Inc42, “Exclusive: GalaxEye Raises ₹44 Cr In Ongoing Series A Funding Round,” March 2026
- Inc42, “GalaxEye Loses Connection With ‘Mission Drishti’ Satellite, Eyes 2 More Launches,” 2026
- Inc42 Datalabs, GalaxEye company financials page, accessed September 2026
- TenNews, “After Drishti Setback, IIT Madras Startup GalaxEye Moves Ahead With Gen-II Mission,” 2026
- Speciale Invest, “Looking back at 2025: how our space economy startups evolved,” 2026
- YourStory, “GalaxEye buys StarOps to strengthen indigenous satellite engineering,” August 2026
- Unlistedzone, “GalaxEye Unlisted Share Price: Is the 3x Premium Justified?,” September 2026
- ACR IIT Madras, “Five-man army of GalaxEye aiming to reach space,” news archive
- GalaxEye Space, company website (galaxeye.space), accessed September 2026
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