Startup Deep Dive : Skyroot Aerospace — priced at $1.1 billion before its rocket had ever flown

On 18 July 2026, a rocket built entirely in India, by a company that had never before sent anything into orbit, put a satellite into a 450-kilometre orbit on its very first try. Nine weeks earlier, investors had already priced that unflown rocket at $1.1 billion, making Skyroot Aerospace India’s first space-tech unicorn before it had proven the vehicle could fly at all.

That is the contradiction sitting at the centre of Skyroot’s story: a company that spent six years and a mounting pile of losses on hardware nobody outside Sriharikota had seen work, yet convinced sovereign wealth funds, an explosives maker and a Google board member’s venture firm to keep writing cheques. This piece traces how two former ISRO engineers turned that bet into Vikram-1, what the company actually earns money from today, and where the numbers say the real risk still sits.

Quick facts

What they do

Skyroot Aerospace designs, builds and flies small orbital rockets under the Vikram name, aimed at companies and government agencies that want to put satellites under about 350 kilograms into low-Earth orbit without waiting in line for a seat on a much larger vehicle. Alongside the launch business, it now also sells rocket components and subsystems, such as solid propulsion stages and avionics, to other players in the space supply chain through a unit it calls Space Systems. The pitch, as told by the company since 2018, is that dedicated small-satellite launch should be scheduled on the customer’s timeline rather than forced onto whatever slot a larger rideshare mission has free, and that a private Indian company can build and fly that rocket for a fraction of what government-run launch programmes have historically cost.

The origin

Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka met while working at the Indian Space Research Organisation. Chandana, an IIT Kharagpur graduate, spent about six years at ISRO and worked on the LVM3 launch vehicle, the rocket that later carried India’s Chandrayaan missions. Daka, an IIT Madras graduate, worked as a flight-computer engineer at ISRO, designing avionics modules for Indian launch vehicles. In 2018, the two left secure government jobs to found Skyroot Aerospace in Hyderabad, betting that India’s small-satellite launch demand, then served almost entirely by ISRO’s own rockets on ISRO’s own schedule, could support a dedicated private alternative built faster and cheaper using carbon-composite structures and 3D-printed engine parts.

That bet only became legally possible because of a policy shift: in 2020, the Indian government created the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) as a single-window regulator, opening ISRO facilities and allowing private companies into a sector the government had run alone since independence. Skyroot built its earliest hardware inside that narrow post-2020 window, before it had any flight history to point to.

The struggle years

The years between founding and first flight were not smooth, and the company’s own financial filings say so directly. In FY22, Skyroot’s net loss stood at ₹23.7 crore on a business that had not yet flown anything. By FY23, that loss had more than doubled to ₹55.2 crore, even as revenue from actual operations came in at just ₹40 lakh, a rounding error against the cash going out. The expense line explains why: employee-benefit costs alone doubled year on year as the company kept hiring engineers for a rocket that had not yet left the ground.

The bigger, more public strain was time. Skyroot had originally targeted a first orbital launch of Vikram-1 for December 2021, while its manufacturing was still described as “active” that year. That date slipped to 2024, then to a first-half-2025 target, then to June 2026, before the rocket actually flew on 18 July 2026, a delay of roughly four and a half years against the original public schedule. Losses kept widening through the wait: by FY25, Skyroot’s EBITDA loss had grown to ₹107.7 crore, still against a company with essentially no launch revenue of its own. A single suborbital flight, Vikram-S, lifted off on 18 November 2022 and reached an altitude of about 89.5 kilometres, and it mattered enormously as proof that the hardware worked at all, but it was not the orbital vehicle the business plan depended on, and four more years of losses had to be absorbed before that vehicle flew.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in Skyroot’s history sits either side of a single morning. On 7 May 2026, GIC and Sherpalo Ventures led a $60 million round, comprising $50 million of primary equity and $10 million of structured debt, that valued Skyroot at $1.1 billion on a pre-money basis and made it India’s first space-tech unicorn. At that point the company’s flagship product, the four-stage Vikram-1 orbital rocket, had never flown. The valuation was, in effect, a bet on hardware still sitting in a test campaign.

Ten weeks later, on 18 July 2026, that bet was settled. Vikram-1 lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, its countdown paused briefly by a technical hold at the five-minute mark, and reached a planned 450-kilometre low-Earth orbit about 15 minutes after liftoff, carrying Skyroot’s own SCOPE satellite to help assess the flight. The mission made India the third country, after the United States and China, to have a privately built rocket reach orbit, and made Skyroot the first private Indian company to do so on its first attempt. The billion-dollar valuation set in May finally had a flown vehicle behind it.

The money behind it

Skyroot has raised a cumulative $160 million as of May 2026 across its funding history. The shape of that money matters as much as the total. In September 2022, GIC, the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, led a $51 million round with participation from Sherpalo Ventures and Solar Industries India, among others, at a point when Skyroot’s only public flight was still more than two months away. In October 2023, Temasek led a further $27.5 million (about ₹225 crore) round, taking cumulative funding to roughly $95 million. The unicorn-making round followed in May 2026: $60 million co-led by GIC and Sherpalo Ventures, joined by funds managed by BlackRock, Arkam Ventures, Playbook Partners, the founders of Greenko Group and the Shanghvi family office, at the $1.1 billion valuation. Ram Shriram, the founder of Sherpalo Ventures and a longtime Alphabet board member, joined Skyroot’s board as part of that round. Separately, BlackRock-managed entities have also extended Skyroot roughly ₹100 crore in debt financing, according to Indian startup-funding tracker Entrackr.

The more unusual name on the shareholder list is Solar Industries India, best known as India’s largest manufacturer of industrial and defence explosives. It first backed Skyroot with a reported ₹18 crore investment around 2021, a small check by the standards of the later rounds. But Solar Industries’ role goes beyond capital: it supplies solid rocket propellant for Skyroot’s launch vehicles and hosts static-fire testing at its own facility in Nagpur, effectively handing Skyroot access to propellant-manufacturing and explosives-licensing infrastructure that would otherwise have taken years to build independently. According to stock-market commentary on Solar Industries’ own disclosures, that original stake is now carried at a value implying roughly a 55-fold paper gain, a reminder that some of Skyroot’s most valuable early backing came from industrial capability, not just cash.

How it makes money

Skyroot’s long-term business model is Launch-as-a-Service: customers pay to have a dedicated Vikram rocket carry their satellite into a specific orbit on a schedule they choose, rather than sharing a launch with dozens of other payloads. Vikram-1 is priced for dedicated missions in the $15 million to $20 million range and can carry payloads of up to 350 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. Alongside that, Skyroot now sells rocket subsystems, propulsion stages and avionics hardware, through its Space Systems business to other customers in the space supply chain, essentially monetising the manufacturing capability it built for its own rockets.

Here is the part most coverage of Skyroot glosses over: for most of its life, the “revenue” in its financial filings was not launch income at all. Skyroot’s FY24 revenue of ₹29 crore, reported by YourStory, was described in the company’s own filings as coming entirely from interest income earned on the cash sitting in its bank accounts after funding rounds, not from selling anything. The same was broadly true through FY25. It was only in the company’s provisional FY26 filing, covering the year in which Vikram-1 finally flew, that Skyroot booked what Entrackr described as its “first meaningful revenue”: ₹100.6 crore, and, this time, entirely from the Space Systems hardware business rather than from launches or interest. On the cost side, that FY26 filing also showed employee-benefit expenses more than doubling to ₹95.5 crore from ₹35.9 crore the year before, as headcount scaled past 1,000 ahead of a commercial launch cadence the company has not yet demonstrated it can sustain.

The numbers

Figures below are drawn from Skyroot’s own filings as reported by Entrackr and YourStory. FY23 and FY24 figures are net loss; FY25 and FY26 figures, as reported in Skyroot’s provisional FY26 filing, are EBITDA loss, a different measure, so the two pairs of years are not directly comparable on a like-for-like basis. All figures are in ₹ crore.

Two things stand out. First, losses have widened in every year on record, including the year Vikram-1 finally flew. Second, real operating revenue only appeared for the first time in the provisional FY26 numbers, six years after the FY23 figures above, and it came from selling hardware to others rather than from flying Skyroot’s own rocket commercially.

Where the money comes from

The FY26 provisional filing shows Skyroot’s entire ₹100.6 crore of operating revenue coming from a single line: the Space Systems components business, not launch services. Entrackr’s coverage of the same filing reports a forward order book of more than ₹605 crore of contracted Space Systems work through FY28 and over ₹252 crore in customer advances already collected, alongside a company projection of ₹977 crore of revenue in FY27, split roughly ₹345 crore from launch services and ₹633 crore from Space Systems. If that projection holds, FY27 would be the first year launch services show up as a meaningful, separately reported revenue line at all.

The geographic split carries its own surprise for a company whose defining achievement is framed as a national one. Speaking around the May 2026 funding round, Skyroot indicated that only about one-third of its expected launch demand is coming from customers in India, with the rest from international customers, according to TechCrunch’s reporting on the round. A company built to prove India could launch its own satellites is, on its own numbers, expecting most of its paying customers to be based somewhere else.

The risks

Three risks sit close to the surface of Skyroot’s own numbers and public statements. First, Vikram-1 is an expendable, single-use rocket at a time when SpaceX has driven launch costs below $3,000 per kilogram with a reusable Falcon 9 and, by one industry estimate, now carries roughly 70 percent of the global orbital launch market. As long as Vikram rockets fly once and are discarded, Skyroot’s per-launch economics start from a structural disadvantage against reusable competitors, which puts pressure on its $15 million to $20 million dedicated-launch price over time.

Second, that dedicated-launch pricing is itself exposed to commoditisation from rideshare missions. SpaceX’s Transporter rideshare programme has been priced at roughly $5,000 per kilogram, a fraction of what a dedicated Vikram flight costs per kilogram of payload; any customer who can tolerate a shared launch schedule has a cheaper option that does not need Skyroot at all.

Third, the FY26 order book, with more than ₹605 crore of contracted Space Systems work and over ₹252 crore of customer advances, assumes a launch cadence Skyroot has not yet proven it can repeat. Co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana himself put a qualifier on the company’s target of four to six launches in the current financial year, telling Via Satellite that the plan depends on “the observations of the first flight” and that “we may have to change that” if those observations require it. A single anomaly on an early repeat mission, in other words, could delay both the launch manifest and the revenue riding on it.

The takeaway

Skyroot’s history is a useful corrective to the idea that a funding round settles an argument. Investors priced the company at $1.1 billion in May 2026 based on a rocket that had not yet flown; only the actual flight in July 2026 turned that number into something backed by demonstrated hardware, after six years in which every annual filing showed a wider loss than the one before. The other lesson sits in the shareholder register rather than the flight log: Skyroot’s fastest path past a genuine bottleneck, propellant manufacturing and licensed static-test infrastructure, came from an investor, Solar Industries, that supplied capability rather than only capital. For a hardware business built on things that must work the first time, the money that also solves a physical, regulatory or manufacturing problem can matter more than the money that simply adds to the valuation.

Frequently asked questions

What does Skyroot Aerospace actually sell?

Two things: dedicated small-satellite launch services on its Vikram-family rockets, priced at $15 million to $20 million per flight for payloads up to 350 kilograms to low-Earth orbit, and, through its Space Systems business, rocket components and subsystems sold to other players in the space industry. As of the FY26 provisional filing, all of Skyroot’s reported operating revenue came from the Space Systems business, not from launches.

Is Skyroot Aerospace profitable?

No. Skyroot has reported a widening loss in every year for which figures are public, from a ₹23.7 crore net loss in FY22 to an EBITDA loss of ₹130.3 crore in the FY26 provisional filing. Most of the revenue reported in FY23 and FY24 was interest income on cash raised from investors rather than operating income.

What is Vikram-1 and why does its July 2026 launch matter?

Vikram-1 is Skyroot’s four-stage orbital launch vehicle, designed to carry payloads of up to 350 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. Its successful flight on 18 July 2026, reaching a 450-kilometre orbit, made Skyroot the first private Indian company to reach orbit, and made India the third country, after the United States and China, with a privately built rocket that has reached orbit.

How much money has Skyroot Aerospace raised, and at what valuation?

Skyroot has raised a cumulative $160 million as of May 2026. Its most recent round, in May 2026, was a $60 million raise led by GIC and Sherpalo Ventures that valued the company at $1.1 billion, making it India’s first space-tech unicorn.

Who are Skyroot’s founders and what did they do before starting the company?

Skyroot was founded in June 2018 by Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, both former engineers at the Indian Space Research Organisation. Chandana worked on ISRO’s LVM3 launch vehicle; Daka worked as a flight-computer engineer designing avionics for Indian launch vehicles.

Sources

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

• Wikipedia, “Skyroot Aerospace,” accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “Vikram-I,” accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “Vikram-S,” accessed September 2026
• TechCrunch, “India’s first space tech unicorn emerges as Skyroot gears up for orbital launch,” May 2026
• Via Satellite, “Skyroot Secures $60M in Funding, Becoming India’s First Space ‘Unicorn’,” May 2026
• Business Standard, “Skyroot Aerospace raises $60 mn, becomes a unicorn valued at $1.1 bn,” May 2026
• YourStory, “Spacetech startup Skyroot Aerospace raises $51M in Series B round led by GIC,” September 2022
• Businesswire, “Skyroot Aerospace Raises $51 Million Led by GIC to Propel the New Future of Small Satellite Launches,” September 2022
• Entrackr, “Spacetech startup Skyroot Aerospace raises $27 Mn led by Temasek,” October 2023
• Entrackr, “Skyroot Aerospace posts Rs 55 Cr loss in FY23,” September 2023
• YourStory, “Temasek-backed spacetech Skyroot sees 2X revenue growth in FY24 amid widening losses,” October 2024
• Entrackr, “Skyroot’s provisional FY26 financials show Rs 101 Cr revenue; projects Rs 13,205 Cr by FY32,” June 2026
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Skyroot Aerospace bags Rs 100 Cr debt from BlackRock,” 2026
• Space.com, “‘The dawn of a new space era’: Vikram-1, India’s 1st private orbital rocket, aces debut launch,” July 2026
• TechCrunch, “India’s first private rocket, built by startup Skyroot, makes successful launch,” November 2022
• CNN Business, “India’s Skyroot launches country’s first private rocket Vikram-S into space,” November 2022
• Startup Fortune, “Skyroot’s unicorn status puts India’s private launchers on the global venture map,” 2026
• Tradebrains, “How Skyroot Aerospace Could Make Solar Industries a Key Beneficiary of India’s Private Space Race,” 2026
• Whalesbook, “Solar Industries’ Skyroot Stake Value Hits Potential 55x Return,” 2026
• Entrepreneur India, “The Cosmic Trailblazer: Pawan Kumar Chandana, Co-Founder, Skyroot Aerospace”
• Entrepreneur India, “Naga Bharath, Co-founder And COO, Skyroot Aerospace”

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