Investors had a lot of scepticism about investing their money in the spacetech sector, said Sanjay Nekkanti, Founder and CEO of Dhruva Space, highlighting one of the many problems the company faced as a newcomer in the spacetech industry.
At TechSparks 2024, Nekkanti told the audience that he was inspired by a Stanford professor’s teaching on product and customer development models to overcome challenges relating to raising capital, especially in a capital-intensive sector.
Since investors would ask the company about their customers before seeing the product, he said, Dhruva Space went a step ahead and asked customers and built a product based on advance capital.
He explained that Dhruva recognised the necessity of vertical integration to address critical pain points in the industry. Traditionally, the sector operated in silos—the space segment built satellites, the launch segment focused on rocket deployment, the ground segment managed operations, and the applications segment used satellite data for valuable solutions.
This fragmented approach resulted in a tedious and costly process, with subpar turnaround times and questionable reliability due to the involvement of multiple vendors.
“We leveraged the ecosystem that India has built over the last 40-50 years. As a company, we work with about 400-500 different vendors. We have a registered vendor network of close to about 550 vendors. A majority of these guys have been manufacturing for ISRO for decades,” Nekkanti noted on how Dhruva Space subverted demand for heavy capital investments in a vertically integrated company.
Over the long term, the company aims to operate with multiple subsidiaries, each operating individually, and offer Spacetech as a Service, Nekkanti added.
Dhruva Space sells to customers in Australia and UAE, and its offerings are gaining traction in European and American markets as well.
To cater to global and domestic demand, Dhruva Space announced the setting up of a 250,000 sq. ft. assembly integration testing facility in Hyderabad for mass production of spacecraft. It is expected to act as a capacity multiplier, not just for domestic requirements but also for global requirements.
“The government has played a very important role in making a conducive environment for raising capital for getting customers and hand-holding companies to really think big,” said Nekkanti.
This comes after Finance Minister Sitharaman announced a Rs 1,000 crore venture capital fund to boost the space economy in this year’s Union Budget. The funding would boost companies to build technologies domestically for the global market.
