Aditya Birla Ventures propels SpaceTech flight of Pixxel and Digantara

When Indian start-ups Pixxel and Digantara launched their satellites on a SpaceX Transporter-12 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on January 14, 2025, they heralded a transformative new chapter in India’s space odyssey. 

By putting three of its Firefly satellites in orbit, Pixxel became the first private spacetech company in India to have its own constellation of the world’s highest-resolution commercial hyperspectral satellites. Digantara, too, scored a first by launching Space Camera for Object Tracking or SCOT, the world’s first commercial situational space awareness (SSA) satellite for the surveillance of objects as small as 5cm orbiting the earth.

Founded by Anirudh Sharma, Tanveer Ahmed and Rahul Rawat, Digantara intends to make space operations safer by writing a new playbook for space navigation and traffic management given the growing congestion in space. Meanwhile, Pixxel’s founders Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal are building an advanced diagnostic system for Earth that will redefine how we understand and safeguard our planet and its resources.

Giving wing to their path-breaking flight is the Aditya Birla Group’s venture capital firm, Aditya Birla Ventures (ABV). Founded by Aryaman Vikram Birla, ABV invests in new age businesses of tomorrow that are led by outstanding founding teams. 

ABV acquired a minor stake in Digantara’s Series A1 funding round in 2024. And it has backed Pixxel with an investment in 2024. 

Private sector participation in the Indian space economy has been on an upswing ever since the central government founded the Indian National Space Research Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) in 2020. There are nearly 200 space start-ups in the country today. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) expects the country’s space economy to grow from around $9 billion today to $45 billion in 10 years. India has a mere 2 per cent share of the global commercial space market currently. 

Space start-ups like Pixxel and Digantara are eager to tap this opportunity with support from investors such as Aditya Birla Ventures.

Incidentally, both Awais, who is Pixxel’s CEO, and Kshitij, its CTO, founded the company in 2018 as students at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS Pilani). They were part of the student satellite team on campus and collaborated with ISRO scientists on projects. Awais secured a master’s degree in mathematics in 2019, while Khandelwal graduated the same year with a BE in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

Five years later, Pixxel has soared into space. With the Fireflies in orbit, the Pixxel team is “excited to map the invisible, detect the undetectable and pave the way to protecting our planet’s beauty and its future,” states Awais in a LinkedIn post. Incidentally, most of the team members had never built a satellite before.

The compact but powerful Fireflies – three more are slated to go up in orbit shortly – will beam down earth-sensing data that has not been available at this level of resolution and frequency before. That’s because their hyperspectral imaging technology takes what Awais calls an “MRI of the planet”. 

The Firefly constellation is designed to provide global coverage every 24 hours and deliver critical climate and Earth insights with near real-time data collection. Pixxel’s in-house next-gen Earth observation studio, Aurora, analyses this data for applications in sectors ranging from agriculture, energy and mining to infrastructure and defence. The start-up has over 60 clients already, including US space agency NASA, India’s Ministry of Agriculture, mining major Rio Tinto, and British Petroleum.

Like Pixxel, Digantara too was born in a college dorm in 2020. Inspired by their friend Tanveer, who ran a satellite club in his Bengaluru college, Anirudh and Rahul, both engineering students at Lovely Professional University in Punjab, decided to follow suit and build a nano-satellite under an ISRO Student Satellite Launch Programme. After a piece of debris crashed into their student satellite, the trio began to consider how to make space safer. 

The result was Digantara, a new age space cartographer. Their SCOT satellite is already setting new benchmarks in space technology and precision. Digantara intends to use a network of nanosatellites and cloud-based analytics platform to ensure the safety of spacecraft. By tracking every single object in orbit, the founders are also building maps for space with their pioneering Space – Mission Assurance Platform or Space-MAP. In short, they are developing the foundational infrastructure for safer space operations and space traffic management.

Pixxel and Digantara have taken their first step in space, paving the way for other spacetech start-ups. It’s just the beginning of their space odyssey, one that Aditya Birla Venture will continue to propel.