Startup Deep Dive : SatSure — the Rs 31.5 crore company building two satellites for India’s Rs 1,200 crore constellation

SatSure booked ₹31.5 crore of revenue in FY25 (the year to March 2025) and lost ₹42.6 crore doing it, as per the financials Inc42 compiled from its statutory filings. The same company is one of four private firms that have signed up to build, own and operate India’s first national Earth-observation satellite constellation, a project costed at more than ₹1,200 crore ($125 million), for which the consortium asked the government for exactly zero rupees of viability support.

That gap, between a small, loss-making analytics shop and a sovereign-infrastructure contractor, is the whole SatSure story. The Bengaluru company spent its first eight years selling satellite-derived crop intelligence to banks without owning a single satellite. It still does not own one: as of September 2026, the satellite tracker NewSpace Index lists zero of its four planned KaleidEO spacecraft as launched. What it does own is something rarer in Indian space-tech: paying customers, three of whom, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and HDFC Ltd, liked the product enough to buy shares in the company. This piece follows the money from the first ₹5 crore government purchase order in 2017 to the ₹1,200 crore constellation, and explains why the satellites came last.

Quick facts

What they do

SatSure turns satellite imagery into decisions that someone else is paid to make. Its core customer is a bank with an agricultural loan book: SatSure’s Sage platform looks at a farmer’s plot from orbit, works out what is planted, how healthy it is, how the field has performed over previous seasons and what that crop is likely to fetch, and hands the lender a risk score fast enough to approve a Kisan Credit Card loan in minutes rather than weeks. The same imagery engine, sold as Sparta, tells food companies and European banks whether a supply chain touches recently deforested land, a requirement under the EU Deforestation Regulation. A third product, Skies, digitises airspace and obstacle data for the Airports Authority of India. Since 2022 the company has also been building its own satellites through a subsidiary, KaleidEO, so that it eventually stops depending on other people’s pixels. Its buyers are institutions, never farmers: the company describes itself as B2B2C, and it neither lends money nor sells to the end user.

The origin

Prateep Basu’s route to satellites ran through rockets. He worked at ISRO as a propulsion systems engineer on the GSLV Mk III programme, took a master’s degree at the International Space University in Strasbourg, and then joined Northern Sky Research, a Boston-based consultancy that advised investors on the satellite industry, as per his account to the Founder Thesis podcast. That consulting job gave him the founding insight. The satellite business, he concluded, was supply-centric: companies launched hardware first and looked for problems afterwards. He wanted to start from a problem. The one he chose was rural credit. In 2017 an urban borrower could get a loan offer on WhatsApp in seconds while a farmer waited around 30 days for a crop loan, because no one could cheaply verify what was growing on the farm. Basu’s question, as he put it, was why that instant experience could not exist for farmers.

He returned to India in 2017 with two fellow IIST alumni. Rashmit Singh Sukhmani had studied physical sciences at IIST from 2007 to 2011 and then worked as a scientist at the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, an ISRO institute, between 2011 and 2013. Abhishek Raju came from the strategy side of the small-satellite world. The three registered SatSure Analytics India Private Limited on 22 September 2017 with the Registrar of Companies in Vijayawada, not Bengaluru, and that choice of state tells you where the first customer was. Their first pilot ran in Srikakulam district in Andhra Pradesh in late 2017, helped along by a letter of introduction from the local MP, Ram Mohan Naidu. They won a challenge at the AP AgTech Summit backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Andhra Pradesh government issued a purchase order worth ₹5 crore, the company’s first real revenue, as per Founder Thesis.

The struggle years

A ₹5 crore state order in year one sounds like a running start. It was not. SatSure bootstrapped for four and a half years before it raised its first institutional round in February 2022, as per Founder Thesis, which means the founders lived off project revenue and government cycles through 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. The structural problem, as OfficeChai later reconstructed it, was a deadlock: insurers wanted proof that governments trusted satellite-based crop assessments before they would pay for them, and governments wanted proof that insurers trusted them. Neither would go first, and the stalemate was only broken when a government order compelled the use of the data. The company shifted its registered office out of Andhra Pradesh to Bengaluru somewhere along the way, a move recorded in the change of its corporate identification number from an AP-prefixed CIN to a KA one. By the time of its first funding announcement, on 7 February 2022, SatSure had 80 staff and 34 enterprise customers across eight countries, a respectable footprint for a bootstrapped company but a small one for five years of work.

The second struggle is the one still running: the satellites. The timeline has slipped in public three times. In February 2023 Inc42 reported the company planned to own four high-resolution satellites by 2024. The Series A announcement of 30 August 2023 moved that to a launch on track for the fourth quarter of 2025. OfficeChai, writing after the deadline passed, reported it had been pushed to 2026 because the team decided it needed more time on technology development and integration rather than rush the launch. As of September 2026, NewSpace Index still lists the constellation as prototype development, planned four, launched zero, and describes the schedule as behind its original end-of-2025 target. Each slip pushes back the day SatSure stops paying for other people’s imagery.

The third setback is in the accounts. SatSure’s revenue fell 6.4% in FY24, from ₹11.2 crore in FY23 to ₹10.5 crore, while its net loss that year reached ₹54.2 crore, more than five times revenue, as per Inc42’s compilation of the filings. For a company that had told Inc42 in February 2023 that revenue had grown five-fold in the previous twelve months, a flat-to-down year immediately after raising its largest round was a hard reversal. Over the same period the founding team thinned: Abhishek Raju, who had led international expansion as head of EMEA, stepped back from day-to-day operations, though his public profiles say he remains on the cap table as an angel investor.

The turning point

On 7 February 2023 SatSure announced that ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and HDFC Ltd had taken strategic stakes, as part of what Inc42 described as a ₹120 crore Series A. The round formally closed on 30 August 2023 at $15 million in equity and venture debt, led by Baring Private Equity Partners India and Promus Ventures, with Omidyar Network India and xto10X alongside the banks. The money mattered less than who gave it. Three of the largest agricultural lenders in the country were now shareholders in the company whose data sat inside their loan pipelines, which, as OfficeChai put it, made sense to them given how central the data had become to their agri-lending operations. A customer can churn. A shareholder-customer tends to expand.

The numbers on either side of that event are stark. Before it, SatSure was an 80-person company with FY23 revenue of ₹11.2 crore and one small $5 million round behind it. After it, and after the FY24 dip, revenue more than tripled to ₹31.5 crore in FY25, headcount rose to about 158 by 2026 (Inc42), the company’s Sage platform had analysed 2.1 million farmer plots across 1.95 lakh villages (Founder Thesis), and in August 2025 it was chosen as one of four members of the consortium that will build India’s national Earth-observation constellation. The banks’ cheque did not make SatSure a satellite company. It made it a credible one.

The money behind it

SatSure’s funding history is unusual for a company that intends to put hardware in orbit: it is small, it is spread across many tranches, and its most strategically important investors are its customers.

• 7 February 2022, pre-Series A, $5 million: led by Baring Private Equity India, with ADB Ventures (the Asian Development Bank’s venture arm), Flowstate VC, Force Ventures, IndigoEdge Advisors, Toch.ai and angels including Nishchay Goel and Saikiran Krishnamurthy; the company then had 80 staff, 34 enterprise customers in eight countries and offices in Bengaluru, Mumbai, St. Gallen and Liverpool (PR Newswire).
• 7 February 2023, strategic round: ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and HDFC Ltd invest undisclosed amounts as part of a ₹120 crore Series A (Inc42).
• 30 August 2023, Series A close, $15 million: equity plus venture debt, led by Baring Private Equity Partners India and Promus Ventures, with Omidyar Network India, xto10X, Force Ventures, Luckbox Ventures and IndigoEdge; a major portion earmarked for KaleidEO (PR Newswire; Business Today).
• 18 December 2024: follow-on Series A tranche with IndusBridge Ventures as a first-time investor (Tracxn; Dealroom).
• September 2025: a further tranche of roughly $1.8-2.4 million led by Baring Private Equity Partners, recorded by Tracxn as SatSure’s twelfth round.
• 11 June 2026, grant, ₹24.6 crore: IN-SPACe’s Technology Adoption Fund, for the Dhaarini Earth-observation foundation model; the fund covers up to 60% of a startup’s project cost, capped at ₹25 crore (SatSure press release; The Tech Portal).

Three backers changed the company’s trajectory. Baring Private Equity Partners India led the first institutional round, co-led the Series A and was still writing cheques in September 2025, giving SatSure a patient anchor through the FY24 dip. ADB Ventures brought a development-bank stamp that helped with the Southeast Asian and African expansion the pre-Series A was raised for. Promus Ventures, a specialist space investor, co-led the Series A that capitalised KaleidEO, which is when SatSure’s satellite ambition stopped being a memorandum of understanding and became a funded programme.

• Total raised: between $20.06 million across six rounds (Inc42) and $28.9 million across twelve rounds from 41 investors (Tracxn); Founder Thesis puts it at about $27.7 million. The spread reflects whether venture debt and small tranches are counted.
• Valuation: about ₹512 crore as of mid-2025 (Founder Thesis); $92.3-94.1 million as of September 2025 (CB Insights); $91.1 million as of 25 September 2026 (Tracxn). The company has never confirmed a figure.
• Cap table shape (Tracxn, 2026): a parent entity holds 34.1%, funds 32.4%, enterprise investors 12.6%, an ESOP pool 8.4%, and the two active founders 4.1% between them. Named holders include Promus Ventures, Baring Private Equity Partners, TransUnion and Nuvama.

How it makes money

SatSure sells software and analytics subscriptions to institutions, and every revenue line is a version of the same trick: take imagery it mostly did not capture, add proprietary models trained on ground truth, and charge for the decision rather than the picture.

• SatSure Sage (agri-finance): the largest line by the company’s own description. Banks pay to plug Sage into underwriting, crop and acreage validation, loan monitoring, end-use checks, renewals and collections. Pricing is not published; SatSure told The Better India that cost varies considerably depending on portfolio size, geography, APIs and implementation scale. The 2022 CIBIL Credit and Farm Report with TransUnion CIBIL, and the August 2025 Perfios partnership, are distribution deals that put Sage inside pipes lenders already use.
• SatSure Sparta (agriculture, climate, forestry): crop lifecycle monitoring, yield forecasting and, since December 2023, EU Deforestation Regulation compliance checks for FMCG companies and global banks (SatSure blog; Founder Thesis).
• SatSure Skies (aviation and infrastructure): government contracts. The iNETRA aeronautical data platform, built with the Airports Authority of India from a 2019 startup-challenge win, was announced on 31 January 2025 and deployed at five airports: Chennai, Kolkata, Imphal, Calicut and Trichy (SatSure blog; AAI).
• KaleidEO (future): once the satellites fly, imagery and on-board analytics sold to SatSure’s own platforms and to third parties, plus the two satellites it is contributing to the national constellation.

The technical core, as Basu described it to Founder Thesis, is around 40 pixels per farmer plot from 13-band multispectral imagery refreshed every five days, a description that matches the free Sentinel-2 data from Europe’s Copernicus programme, though SatSure has not named its sources. On top sit roughly 300,000 ground-truth data points gathered through field sampling and data-barter arrangements with early banking partners, which the company says lift crop-identification accuracy to 90-95%. The barter matters: banks handed over loan-outcome data in exchange for analytics, and that data is the moat.

• Where the costs sit: people and computing, not launch pads, so far. FY25 total expenses were ₹66.3 crore against ₹31.5 crore of standalone revenue (Inc42), with about 158 employees (Inc42, 2026).
• Where the margin should sit: in the model layer. Public imagery is free and commercial imagery is priced per square kilometre; SatSure’s gross margin depends on how much of a bank’s loan book one trained model can cover without new field work.
• The part people get wrong: SatSure is routinely called a satellite company. Through FY25, 100% of its revenue came from analytics on data it did not collect from its own spacecraft, because it had none in orbit.

The numbers

SatSure is private and its filings are not public documents, so the figures below are those Inc42 compiled from the company’s statutory filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Inc42’s two pages disagree slightly on FY24 revenue (₹9.7 crore on one, ₹10.5 crore on the other); both are shown. The FY23 net loss is not reported in any accessible source.

• FY25 net margin: minus 97.3% (Inc42), meaning SatSure lost roughly a rupee for every rupee it earned, an improvement on FY24, when it lost about five.
• FY25 estimated EBITDA: minus ₹39.2 crore (Inc42).
• Net worth: down 10.4% over FY25 (Tofler summary).
• Scale check: the ₹24.6 crore IN-SPACe grant announced in June 2026 is equal to about 78% of FY25 standalone revenue.
• Headcount: 80 in February 2022 (PR Newswire); about 158 in 2026, down 7.6% in the preceding 90 days (Inc42).

Where the money comes from

SatSure does not publish a segment or geography split, and its filings summaries do not break revenue out. What can be said from disclosed material is the following.

• By product: Sage, the banking product, is described by OfficeChai as the primary revenue stream, with government contracts and infrastructure monitoring next, and insurance, utilities, forestry and aviation smaller. The company’s own website groups its markets as banking, agriculture, aviation, utilities, infrastructure and natural resources.
• By geography: India is the core, through the three bank shareholders and the Airports Authority of India. Abroad, SatSure entered the United States in May 2022 by acquiring Philadelphia-based Old City Innovations in a cash-and-stock deal (Via Satellite), bought the Indore farm-management app CropTrails the same month, works with Netherlands-based Rabo Partnerships and Kenya’s KALRO (OfficeChai), and piloted maize and cotton acreage estimation in Kenya under the Gates Foundation-supported SSAGA alliance launched in Kigali on 28 January 2025 (Intellecap). Its 2025 press boilerplate lists India, Western Europe, Australia, North America, the Middle East and Japan.
• By customer type: 34 enterprise customers across eight countries in February 2022 (PR Newswire), more than ten countries by 2025 (OfficeChai).
• Public money: a ₹5 crore Andhra Pradesh order in 2017 (Founder Thesis), the AAI platform, and the ₹24.6 crore TAF grant in 2026 mean the Indian state has been a material payer at every stage.

The surprise is what is missing. For a company whose name and press coverage are about satellites, no satellite has yet produced a rupee of revenue. The entire ₹31.5 crore of FY25 came from the downstream analytics business, and the upstream business, KaleidEO, has so far consumed capital: the majority of the $15 million Series A, by the company’s own statement to Business Today in September 2023.

The risks

• Hardware execution against a thin balance sheet. SatSure has raised at most $28.9 million in its life (Tracxn), lost ₹42.6 crore in FY25, and has committed to two of the twelve satellites in a consortium project costed above ₹1,200 crore that bid ₹0 for viability-gap funding, walking away from up to ₹350 crore of possible state support (DeepTech India). The consortium’s first launches are expected from 2027 and the constellation must be operational by 2029 (SatNews, August 2026). Its own four-satellite KaleidEO plan has already slipped from 2024 to Q4 2025 to 2026, with zero launched. Every quarter of delay is a quarter of imagery bought from others and a quarter of engineers paid without an asset to show for it. The mechanism is simple: if the satellites are late and the next round is priced on analytics revenue alone, the company dilutes hard or slows the build.
• Customer concentration inside a policy-driven market. The revenue engine is Kisan Credit Card and crop-loan underwriting at a handful of large lenders who are also shareholders. That alignment cuts both ways: it locks in usage, but it also ties SatSure’s growth to those banks’ agri-loan appetite and to Reserve Bank of India rules on collateral-free farm lending. The FY24 revenue decline of 6.4%, in a year the company was supposedly scaling, shows how lumpy institutional and government contracts can be. Only 39% of Indian farmers borrow from formal sources (TransUnion CIBIL, 2022), which is the opportunity, but it also means the market SatSure serves is the one the state most likes to regulate.
• Commoditisation of the input. SatSure’s models sit on imagery that is either free (public multispectral data) or bought from commercial operators; its September 2023 edge-computing demonstration, for instance, ran on imagery from Uruguay’s Satellogic with hardware from Australia’s Spiral Blue. If the analytics layer is what customers value, larger imagery providers and bank-side data vendors can build it too, and the ₹24.6 crore Dhaarini grant is partly an acknowledgement that foundation models, not pixels, are where defensibility must come from. If instead KaleidEO’s 0.7-metre and 1.2-metre payloads are the differentiator, then SatSure is competing on capital against constellations funded at ten times its lifetime raise.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from SatSure is about sequencing in deep tech: sell the decision before you build the sensor. Basu’s diagnosis in 2017 was that satellite companies were supply-centric, and his answer was to spend eight years becoming the demand side, embedding his analytics so deeply into bank credit pipelines that the banks bought equity to protect their access. Only then, with customers on the cap table and a government consortium behind it, did SatSure commit real capital to orbit. The cost of that sequence is visible in the numbers: small rounds, a ₹54.2 crore loss on ₹10.5 crore of revenue in FY24, a satellite schedule that has slipped twice, and a company that is still, in September 2026, a satellite firm without satellites. The benefit is that when the hardware does fly, it will have a paying use on day one. Most Indian space-tech founders have chosen the opposite order. SatSure is the test of whether patience with the product can substitute for a large balance sheet.

Frequently asked questions

What does SatSure actually sell?

Software subscriptions and analytics built on satellite imagery: Sage for bank agri-lending decisions, Sparta for crop, climate and deforestation monitoring, and Skies for aeronautical and infrastructure data. Its customers are banks, insurers, food companies and government bodies, not farmers.

How much revenue does SatSure make and is it profitable?

Revenue was ₹31.5 crore standalone (₹33.6 crore consolidated) in FY25, up 226.4% from FY24, with a net loss of ₹42.6 crore, as per Inc42’s compilation of its statutory filings. It has not reported a profit.

Who owns SatSure?

Investors include Baring Private Equity Partners India, Promus Ventures, ADB Ventures, Omidyar Network India, IndusBridge Ventures and TransUnion, plus three bank shareholders, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and HDFC Ltd. Tracxn puts the two active founders’ combined stake at about 4.1%.

Does SatSure have its own satellites?

Not yet, as of September 2026. Its subsidiary KaleidEO has qualified a sub-metre optical and multispectral payload and plans four satellites in very low Earth orbit at about 380 km; the launch, once targeted for 2024 and then Q4 2025, is now expected in 2026. SatSure is also building two of the twelve satellites in India’s national Earth-observation constellation.

What is SatSure’s role in India’s national EO constellation?

It is one of four members of the Pixxel-led consortium, later formalised as Allied Orbits Private Limited, chosen by IN-SPACe in August 2025 to build a 12-satellite constellation costing more than ₹1,200 crore. SatSure contributes two satellites carrying KaleidEO’s wide-swath imager and provides mission operations and end-user analytics; the consortium bid ₹0 for government viability-gap funding.

Sources

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

• Inc42, SatSure company profile and financials pages (FY23, FY24 and FY25 revenue, loss, expenses, headcount, funding), accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Spacetech Startup SatSure Receives Strategic Investment From ICICI Bank, Others”, February 2023
• Tofler and Vakilsearch, MCA records for SatSure Analytics India Private Limited (CIN, incorporation date, registered office, directors, net worth change), accessed September 2026
• PR Newswire, “SatSure raises Pre-Series A round of US$5 million”, February 2022
• PR Newswire, “SatSure raises $15 million in Series A round led by Baring Private Equity Partners, India and Promus Ventures”, August 2023
• PR Newswire, “SatSure Joins Pixxel, PierSight, and Dhruva Space as the Winning Consortium for IN-SPACe led Public-Private Partnership”, August 2025
• PR Newswire, “Perfios Partners with SatSure to Revolutionize the Agri-Lending with Earth Intelligence”, August 2025
• Pixxel, “Pixxel-Led Consortium Signs Agreement with IN-SPACe to Build India’s National EO Constellation”, January 2026
• DeepTech India, “Pixxel-led Allied Orbits consortium wins IN-SPACe deal”, August 2025
• SatNews, “Private Consortium Allied Orbits Secures Approval to Build India’s ₹1,200 Crore Commercial Satellite Constellation”, August 2026
• SatSure press release, “SatSure Wins ₹24.6 Crore IN-SPACe Grant to Build Dhaarini”, June 2026; The Tech Portal, “India’s space regulator selects Astrobase, SatSure and TM2SPACE for first Technology Adoption Fund allocation”, June 2026
• SatSure press release, “SatSure and Dhruva Space forge strategic alliance to deliver end-to-end Earth Observation-as-a-Service”, June 2025
• Founder Thesis, “How Prateep Basu and SatSure Are Turning Satellite Pixels Into Farm Loans”, 2025
• OfficeChai, “SatSure: The Bengaluru Startup That’s Getting India’s Biggest Banks To Invest In Satellites”, 2026
• The Better India, “This Satellite Tech Is Helping Farmers Cut Loan Wait Times From 15 Days to Just 30 Minutes”, 2025
• Business Today, “Bengaluru based KaleidEO becomes first Indian firm to deploy edge computing in space”, September 2023
• eoPortal, “KaleidEO Constellation (SatSure)” mission page, accessed September 2026
• NewSpace Index, “SatSure (KaleidEO) satellite constellation”, accessed September 2026
• Via Satellite, “SatSure Acquires Old City Innovations to Enter US Geospatial Market”, May 2022
• TransUnion CIBIL newsroom, “TransUnion CIBIL and SatSure Launch CIBIL Credit and Farm Report”, October 2022
• SatSure blog, “iNetra by SatSure: A Step Towards Digital Transformation for India’s Aviation”, August 2024; Airports Authority of India announcement, January 2025
• Intellecap, “How SatSure is Revolutionising Agriculture with Satellite Intelligence”, 2025
• Tracxn, SatSure funding, investors and shareholding pages, accessed September 2026; CB Insights, SatSure financials page, accessed September 2026; Dealroom, IndusBridge Ventures profile, accessed September 2026
• Crunchbase and IndiaAI people profiles for Rashmit Singh Sukhmani and Abhishek Raju, accessed September 2026

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