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Startup Deep Dive : Astrome Technologies — a decade-old satellite dream finally gets funded

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Astrome Technologies.

Astrome Technologies has spent a decade chasing a single idea: that broadband could be beamed as cheaply as satellite television once was. For most of that decade, the Bengaluru deep-tech firm could not afford to build the satellites at all — it survived on angel cheques, government grants and a fibre-replacement radio sold to telecom towers and army units. Then, in January 2025, private equity giant Apollo Global Management led a $10 million round (reported as ₹86.35 crore) into a company whose full-year revenue, the year before, had been just ₹8.29 crore.

That gap — a marquee global investor backing a company still earning single-digit crores — is the story of Astrome. It built a wireless backhaul radio called GigaMesh to survive, proved it in villages and army camps, and only now, ten years after founding, is it being funded to attempt the satellite network it originally set out to build.

Quick facts

Company Astrome Technologies Private Limited
Founded 20 May 2015, Bengaluru
Founder(s) Dr Neha Satak (CEO) and Dr Prasad H L Bhat (Chairman and CTO)
Businesses GigaMesh (E-band wireless backhaul radio), GigaSat (satellite antenna terminal for defence), an emerging satellite-communication terminal and payload line, and a government-backed small-satellite bus programme
Latest FY revenue ₹8.29 crore (FY24, as per MCA filings reported by TheKredible)
Latest FY profit/loss Loss of ₹1.73 crore (FY24)
Listed Private/unlisted
Market value/last valuation Not publicly disclosed
Key shareholders Neha Satak, Horabailu Laxminarayana Prasad (Prasad Bhat) and Apollo Global Management are named among the top shareholders as of March 2025, per Tracxn

What they do

Astrome makes wireless hardware that does the job of fibre-optic cable without the digging. Its flagship product, GigaMesh, is a multi-beam E-band (millimetre-wave) radio that telecom operators and system integrators mount on towers to carry 5G-ready backhaul capacity into villages and terrain where laying fibre is slow or uneconomical. The company sells this hardware, and increasingly related services, to telecom operators, government-backed rural connectivity programmes, and defence customers including the Indian Army and Indian Navy, while a newer product line — satellite antennas and payloads — targets the same connectivity problem from orbit rather than from a tower.

The origin

Neha Satak and Prasad H L Bhat met while working on a student satellite programme at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. Satak went on to research space systems at Texas A&M University and had already founded an asteroid-deflection venture; Bhat co-founded Streamoid Technologies, an AI-driven fashion-retail startup, before the two reconnected. Their founding conversation, as later recounted to Officechai, turned on a simple analogy: if satellite television could beam a signal cheaply across an entire country from space, why should broadband internet need a cable buried in the ground to reach the same houses? They registered Astrome Technologies on 20 May 2015 in Bengaluru, incubated at IISc, with a founding vision of a low-earth-orbit satellite constellation — later named SpaceNet — that would beam internet directly to rural India the way a DTH dish beams television.

The struggle years

The constellation was the dream; it was also, for a pre-revenue Indian startup, unbuildable. Satellites are capital-intensive and slow to license, so Astrome had to shelve the orbital plan and build something it could actually finance and sell: a ground radio. It took three years of lab work before the company could prove its patented multi-beam millimetre-wave technology actually worked — a milestone the Department of Science and Technology dates to 2018, after which Astrome was granted patents in India and the United States. Through this period the company leaned on the DST-ABI Women Startup Programme and IISc’s backing rather than institutional venture capital, alongside early money from strategic investor Integra Micro Systems.

The thinness of that runway shows up in the filings. As late as the fiscal year ending March 2022, Astrome’s operating revenue was under ₹1 crore, as per Tofler’s record of its MCA filings. A year later, in FY23, revenue had inched up to ₹2.71 crore — but the company lost ₹4.93 crore that same year, a loss nearly twice its revenue, seven-plus years after founding. The September 2021 fundraise of $3.4 million, co-led by Indian Angel Network and Cognizant co-founder Lakshmi Narayanan, was explicitly earmarked for “market expansion to the US” and global operator trials, as per DQIndia — the kind of raise a company makes when it is trying to convert years of unpaid-for lab work into paying customers, not one it makes from a position of comfort.

The turning point

The numbers either side of the turn are stark. In FY23, Astrome earned ₹2.71 crore and lost ₹4.93 crore. By FY24, revenue had roughly tripled to ₹8.29 crore while the loss had narrowed by about 65% to ₹1.73 crore, as per TheKredible’s reading of the company’s filings — the first year the underlying hardware business looked like it might work at scale. That improvement set up the moment that mattered most: on 27 January 2025, Apollo Global Management led a $10 million round (₹86.35 crore) into Astrome, with returning investor IAN Fund participating, as reported by Entrackr and Business Standard. It was Astrome’s first institutional, private-equity-scale cheque in a decade of operating on angel money and grants. Neha Satak framed it as a homecoming rather than a pivot: “This foray into the satcom market represents the timely realisation of the vision with which this company was founded,” she said, as quoted by Inc42 — a decade after the constellation idea had been shelved for want of exactly this kind of capital.

The money behind it

How it makes money

Astrome is, first and foremost, a hardware company: it designs and sells radio units, then earns follow-on revenue from deployment and support as operators extend networks tower by tower. Its revenue mix, as best documented, breaks down as follows.

The numbers

Astrome discloses no formal segment margins, but three consecutive years of MCA filings show a company moving from token revenue to a real, if still small, commercial base.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Profit/(loss) (₹ crore)
FY22 (year to March 2022) Under ₹1 crore Not disclosed in sources checked
FY23 (year to March 2023) 2.71 (4.93)
FY24 (year to March 2024) 8.29 (1.73)

Where the money comes from

Astrome was conceived to serve rural, underserved India, and its earliest commercial proof points do sit there — but the customer mix that has actually generated revenue and funding skews toward institutions, not retail rural subscribers.

The risks

The takeaway

Astrome’s decade holds a useful lesson for any deep-tech founder sitting on an expensive, unfundable idea: build the version you can afford first. The company did not abandon its satellite ambition in 2015 so much as postpone it, spending years proving a cheaper, sellable radio to defence units and rural telecom programmes while the harder problem waited for capital that could only arrive once the smaller business had a track record. The GigaMesh years were not a detour from the mission; they were the collateral that eventually bought Astrome the right to attempt it. Patience, in a capital-intensive sector, can look indistinguishable from failure for a long time — until the filings turn, and the cheque that was always too big to hope for finally lands.

Frequently asked questions

What does Astrome Technologies make?

Astrome makes GigaMesh, a multi-beam E-band wireless radio that substitutes for fibre-optic backhaul on telecom towers, along with GigaSat, a steerable satellite antenna terminal built for defence use, and it is developing satellite payloads and a small-satellite bus platform under a government-backed programme.

Who founded Astrome and when?

Dr Neha Satak and Dr Prasad H L Bhat founded Astrome Technologies on 20 May 2015 in Bengaluru, after meeting while working on a student satellite programme at the Indian Institute of Science.

How much funding has Astrome raised, and who are its investors?

Reported cumulative funding ranges from about $15 million to $17.6 million depending on the source (Tracxn and Inc42 differ), across investors including Apollo Global Management, Indian Angel Network (IAN Fund), Integra Micro Systems, Lakshmi Narayanan and Urania Ventures; the company’s valuation is not publicly disclosed.

Is Astrome Technologies profitable or listed on a stock exchange?

No. Astrome is an unlisted private company and was still loss-making as of its FY24 filings, though its loss narrowed to ₹1.73 crore that year from ₹4.93 crore in FY23 as revenue grew, as per TheKredible’s reading of MCA filings.

What is Astrome’s satellite venture, SpaceNet, and how far along is it?

SpaceNet is Astrome’s plan for a low-earth-orbit satellite constellation, reportedly of around 198 microsatellites, to beam broadband directly to users; as of the most recent reporting reviewed for this piece, no SpaceNet satellites are yet in orbit, and the company’s near-term satellite work is centred on a government-backed small-satellite bus grant and defence antenna terminals instead.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

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