Pawan Kumar Chandana resigned from ISRO in 2018 with no startup experience and no investor network. Seven years later, Skyroot Aerospace is India's first space-tech unicorn — with a rocket on the launchpad at Sriharikota.
Rashmeet Kaur Chawla
When Chandana and his co-founder Naga Bharath Daka started Skyroot Aerospace in June 2018, India's private space ecosystem was essentially non-existent. There were no launch vehicle startups. No dedicated space-tech investors. No regulatory framework for private players to operate within. The entire sector ran on government approval, government timelines, and government budgets.
Chandana understood this better than most “He had worked inside that system for nearly six years. He knew its strengths. He also knew what it couldn't do at the speed the global market demanded.”
The conflict wasn't just external. It was structural. Private rocket companies require enormous capital, tolerate years without revenue, and operate in an industry where a single failure can end a company. The odds were staggering. The path was unclear. And the people with the money had never backed anything like this before.
Chandana had to figure out how equity worked — by Googling it. He cold-messaged investors on LinkedIn. He faced rejection after rejection from venture funds who didn't understand the space sector's timelines. COVID hit, slowing down everything. Cash ran dangerously low.
And still, he did not stop.
Pawan Kumar Chandana was born in 1991 in Hyderabad, Telangana. He grew up in a middle-class household with a natural curiosity about machines, but his early academic record gave no obvious hint of the trajectory ahead. As a school student, he once scored just 51 marks in mathematics the very subject that would later anchor his entire career.
His father refused to let that define him. He enrolled Pawan in IIT coaching, and something shifted. Mathematics clicked. Physics became fascinating. The boy who had once struggled in exams cleared the IIT Joint Entrance Examination one of the most competitive tests in the world on his very first attempt.
In 2007, he joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, pursuing a dual degree programme: a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering and a Master of Technology in Thermal Science and Engineering, graduating in 2012.
The campus culture normalised entrepreneurship in a way that most engineering colleges in India did not. Chandana has spoken about how his years at KGP made him believe that building a company from scratch was not just possible it was something you could actually plan for.
He graduated in 2012 and was campus-recruited by ISRO, joining the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram the very facility that has launched India's most significant missions. He worked there for nearly six years, contributing to the GSLV Mk-III (India's heaviest launch vehicle), the S-200 solid booster for GSLV Mk-II, and served as deputy project manager for ISRO's Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV). In 2016, he won an internal innovation award at ISRO.
By any measure, Chandana was on track for a distinguished career inside India's most respected scientific institution. But ISRO, as formidable as it was, could only do so much. And Chandana wanted to do more — faster.
In 2018, Pawan Kumar Chandana did something most engineers in India would call career suicide. He resigned from one of the most coveted jobs in the country a scientist's role at ISRO with no startup experience, no investor network, and no guarantee that what he was about to build was even legally possible. Private rocket companies barely existed in India. The policy framework didn't support them. The investors didn't understand them.
And yet, Chandana walked out anyway.
But it was out of a conviction so deep it would eventually reshape India's entire relationship with space.
Being an entrepreneur is far more fulfilling.
Seven years later, that conviction has a name - Skyroot Aerospace. A valuation of $1.1 billion. The status of India's first space-tech unicorn. And a rocket sitting on the launchpad at Sriharikota, days away from becoming the first privately developed orbital rocket ever launched from Indian soil.
In June 2018, Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka a fellow ISRO engineer and IIT Bombay alumnus co-founded Skyroot Aerospace, headquartered in Hyderabad. Their mission, stated simply and without irony: to democratise access to space by making satellite launches affordable, frequent, and commercially competitive.
The early days were humbling. Chandana had deep engineering knowledge but zero startup experience. He didn't know how term sheets worked. He learned what equity meant by reading about it online. He reached out to investors, including the entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal, who agreed to meet and ultimately invested $1.5 million, giving Skyroot its first institutional lifeline.
That bet opened the door. The founders of Greenko, a renewable energy conglomerate, followed with support. And then, gradually, others came.
2020 was a watershed year not just for Skyroot, but for India's entire private space narrative. The Indian government, recognising the global momentum behind commercial spaceflight, opened the sector to private players. For the first time, Indian startups could design, build, and launch rockets without running every decision through a government agency.
Skyroot became among the first Indian space startups to sign a framework agreement with ISRO under the new liberalised policy. The regulatory pathway was now real. The question was whether Skyroot could execute.
What made Skyroot different from the beginning was not just ambition it was engineering philosophy. In July 2020, Skyroot became the first private Indian company to test a rocket engine, the Raman-1, a cryogenic engine named after Nobel laureate C.V. Raman. More tests followed. The company developed its Vikram series of launch vehicles, named in honour of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, the father of India's space programme.
Skyroot leaned heavily into 3D-printed engine components and carbon composite structures technologies that dramatically reduce manufacturing time and cost compared to conventional aerospace methods. It was a fundamental rethinking of how rockets could be built at commercial scale.
On November 18, 2022, Skyroot achieved something historic. Vikram-S, a single-stage suborbital rocket, lifted off from ISRO's Sriharikota launch range — making India's first private rocket launch a reality. Mission Prarambh, meaning 'beginning' in Sanskrit, was exactly that. A beginning.
The rocket carried three payloads, validated 80% of the technologies intended for the orbital Vikram-1, and placed India in a rare global club: countries where a private company had successfully launched a rocket. The United States had SpaceX. New Zealand had Rocket Lab. India now had Skyroot.
Chandana does not speak about Skyroot as a company chasing valuation or market share. He speaks about it as a civilisational bet on India's potential to lead in deep technology, on private enterprise as a force multiplier for national capability, and on space as an economic frontier that must be made accessible.
His first Core Belief: Space is infrastructure, not aspiration. In the same way that roads and ports enable commerce, launch capability enables the satellite economy weather forecasting, communications, earth observation, agriculture, disaster response. By lowering the cost of reaching orbit, Skyroot is not just building rockets. It is building the infrastructure layer of a future economy.
His second Core Belief: India must compete globally, not just nationally. Chandana has stated that 70 to 80 percent of Skyroot's revenues will eventually come from international customers from the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The company is not positioning itself as an Indian solution to an Indian problem. It is positioning itself as the fastest, most cost-competitive dedicated launch provider in the world.
His third belief: Speed is a strategic asset. In an industry accustomed to decade-long development cycles, Chandana pushed Vikram-1 from concept to orbital readiness in roughly four to five years among the fastest timelines globally for an orbital launch vehicle. The goal post-launch: achieve a 72-hour assembly-to-launch turnaround.
In Skyroot's early years, raising capital from Indian investors for a deep-tech hardware startup was, in Chandana's own words, like trying to 'break the glass ceiling.' The timelines were too long, the risk too high, the understanding of the sector too thin.
COVID arrived in 2020 and compounded everything. Supply chains stalled. Testing schedules slipped. The company had limited runway and no clear visibility on when it would generate revenue. For many startups, this would have been the end.
Chandana chose to be transparent about the challenges with his team, with investors, and with the public. The delays in Vikram-1's orbital timeline became a test of credibility for the entire Indian private space sector.
Every time a timeline slipped, the criticism was not just about Skyroot; it was about whether private Indian companies could ever deliver what they promised.
He held the line. He explained the engineering realities supply chain complexity, precision testing requirements, the nature of first-of-its-kind development. And he built a culture at Skyroot where technical rigour was non-negotiable, even when it cost time.
On May 7, 2026, Skyroot Aerospace made history for the second time. The company raised $60 million in a funding round co-led by Sherpalo Ventures the firm of Ram Shriram, the first external investor in Google and GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. BlackRock-affiliated funds, Arkam Ventures, and the founders of Greenko also participated. The round valued Skyroot at $1.1 billion on a pre-money basis, making it India's first space-tech unicorn and the first deep-tech hardware startup in India to cross the billion-dollar threshold in 2026.
Total capital raised since inception: $160 million.
Ram Shriram joined Skyroot's board the same person who once wrote the first cheque for Google is now on the board of India's most important private rocket company.
But the bigger milestone was already at the launchpad. Vikram-1 a 23-metre, three-stage solid-fuelled rocket with a liquid-fuelled kick stage had been transported to Sriharikota. It was undergoing final integration. The first private orbital launch from Indian soil was now a matter of weeks.
Vikram-1 is designed to carry up to 480 kg to a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit. Vikram-2, already in development, will carry up to 900 kg to low Earth orbit using a cryogenic upper stage. Skyroot is targeting four to six launches this financial year and has set an ambitious target of becoming one of the leading rocket launch businesses globally by 2030.
It is the quality of his thinking and the discipline of his execution. He is an engineer who became a CEO without abandoning the engineer's instinct to test everything, to understand the system, to accept failure as data and not as defeat.
He leads from the front technically, still deeply involved in propulsion decisions and system architecture. At the same time, he has built a team of over 300 engineers operating out of Skyroot's 250,000 square foot facility the Max-Q and Infinity campuses in Hyderabad.
He thinks in global terms. When Chandana positions Skyroot against its competition, he does not compare it to other Indian startups. He compares it to Rocket Lab, to ABL Space, to the global small-launch market that is currently underserved. His goal is not to be the best rocket company in India. It is to be among the best in the world.
He is also unusually candid. In interviews, Chandana rarely performs the polished optimism of a VC-backed founder. He talks about what is hard, what has gone wrong, and what still needs proving. That honesty has earned Skyroot a credibility in the industry that no amount of marketing could manufacture.
When Chandana started Skyroot, the policy wasn't ready.
· The funding ecosystem wasn't ready.
· The infrastructure wasn't ready.
· None of that mattered, because he went ahead anyway.
· And by the time those things became ready, Skyroot had already done the work that allowed it to take advantage of them.
· He learned equity by Googling it.
· He found his first investor by cold messaging on LinkedIn. He held a company together through a global pandemic with nothing but conviction and a team that believed in the mission.
His advice, stated plainly: build the thing. Ask for the meeting. Take the risk. Not because the odds are in your favour, they probably aren't. But because the only way to change what is possible is to attempt what seems impossible.
India's next generation of deep-tech founders will not emerge from software. They will emerge from laboratories, machine shops, test facilities, and launchpads.
· Left the certainty of established institutions to build in an industry India had barely imagined entering private space technology when there was no ecosystem, no precedent, and no assured path forward.
· Prioritized engineering integrity over market optics choosing transparency, technical precision, and long-term credibility instead of unrealistic promises and accelerated narratives.
· Built with a global vision from inception positioning Skyroot Aerospace not merely as an Indian startup, but as a competitive player in the international space economy from day one.
· Transformed adversity into strategic strength navigating policy voids, funding constraints, and pandemic-era disruptions by building deeper technological resilience rather than scaling back ambition.
· Redefined what was considered impossible for India’s private sector leading milestones such as India’s first private rocket launch, the rise of one of the country’s pioneering space-tech unicorns, and the development of a private orbital launch vehicle capable of standing on the global stage.
India has always had the scientific capability to compete in space. What it lacked was the entrepreneurial infrastructure to commercialise that capability at speed. Chandana is building that infrastructure one rocket test, one orbital milestone, one investor board meeting at a time.
When Vikram-1 lifts off from Sriharikota, it will carry more than its payload. It will carry the accumulated proof that a private Indian startup, built with Indian talent, Indian capital, and Indian ambition, can go to space on its own terms.
That is what Challengers do. They do not ask permission from the possible. They expand what the possible means.
This is not only about rockets, technology, or billion-dollar valuations. It is about conviction, resilience, and the courage to move before the world is ready. Chandana’s journey reflects a larger transformation unfolding across India where deep-tech ambition is no longer limited to institutions, but driven by founders willing to redefine the future itself.
In every generation, a few individuals step beyond the safety of convention and choose to build what their country has not yet imagined possible. Pawan Kumar Chandana belongs to that rare category of challengers. At a time when India’s private space ecosystem barely existed, he walked away from certainty at ISRO to pursue a vision larger than personal success
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