Two ISRO Engineers Quit Their Jobs to Build India’s First Private Rocket. The Unlikely Story of Skyroot Aerospace.
There is a particular kind of courage it takes to walk away from a stable government job in India— the kind your parents brag about at family gatherings, the kind with a pension and a title and the invisible prestige of ISRO stamped on your business card. Pawan Kumar Chandana did it anyway. So did his colleague Naga Bharath Daka. In 2018, the two rocket engineers from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) handed in their resignations, rented a small office in Hyderabad, and started a company with a name that sounded slightly mad at the time: Skyroot Aerospace.
Their pitch was simple, almost stubborn in its clarity: India had no private launch vehicles. The global small satellite market was growing fast. And the two of them knew how to build rockets. On May 7, 2026 — less than eight years from that first office lease, Skyroot announced it had closed a $60 million funding round, crossed a $1.1 billion valuation, and become India’s first space tech unicorn. Vikram-1, their orbital rocket, was already on the launchpad at Sriharikota, waiting for its moment in history.
When Chandana and Daka left ISRO, they assumed the hardest part would be the engineering. They were wrong. The hardest part was the paperwork.
In 2018, there was no legal framework for a private Indian company to build, test, or launch a rocket. The IN-SPACe (Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre) didn’t exist yet. Private firms couldn’t access ISRO facilities. There was no precedent, which meant every step, every permit, every testing approval, every vendor contract required inventing a process from scratch. “We spent the first six months just figuring out what we were legally allowed to do,” Chandana has said in interviews.
The timing, it turned out, was not terrible. The government had been quietly working on space sector reforms, and in 2020, India announced it would open space activities to private companies. Skyroot had positioned itself perfectly— two years of groundwork, supplier relationships already in place, and a team that had grown to a handful of engineers working out of what was essentially a large garage.
The Suborbital Bet That Changed Everything
On November 18, 2022, Skyroot made history quietly. Their Vikram-S— a single-stage, solid-fuel suborbital rocket lifted off from Sriharikota and reached an altitude of around 90 kilometres before splashing down in the Bay of Bengal. The flight lasted about six minutes. It carried three commercial payloads and a small plaque that read: “The sky is not the limit.”
It was India’s first privately developed rocket launch, and the reaction was something between astonishment and pride. ISRO chief S. Somanath called the founders personally. Photographs of Chandana and Daka — dishevelled, sleep-deprived, crying went viral. But inside the company, the reaction was more sober. A suborbital flight is not an orbital one. Vikram-S had proved the team could build and launch a rocket. Vikram-1 would have to prove they could actually reach orbit.
From Garage to $500 Million: The Investment Story
Skyroot’s early funding story is not one of overnight VC glamour. The founders raised a seed round quietly in 2019— small, enough to hire a core team and begin prototyping. The real inflection point came in 2021, when they closed a Series A that brought in institutional investors who were willing to bet on a sector that had, until recently, been entirely off-limits to private capital in India.
By their 2023 funding round, Skyroot was valued at $500 million on a pre-money basis. That was already remarkable— a private Indian space company, valued at half a billion dollars, five years after two engineers had walked out of ISRO with nothing but their knowledge. The round included names that signalled serious conviction: early backers from India’s deep-tech ecosystem, venture funds that understood long development timelines and were not expecting a quick exit.
Then came May 2026. The $60 million round— $50 million in primary equity and $10 million in structured debt— arrived as Vikram-1 sat on the launchpad. The investors this time were a different calibre entirely.
Ram Shriram, the founder of Sherpalo Ventures, is not a name that appears casually in startup press releases. He is one of the original investors in Google— he signed his cheque before the company had a real office. His decision to join Skyroot’s board alongside this round was treated, in Indian startup circles, as a kind of global endorsement. When someone who backed Google at the beginning believes your orbital launch company is the real thing, people notice.
The Rocket Itself: What Vikram-1 Actually Does
Vikram-1 is designed to carry payloads of up to 350 kilograms into low Earth orbit. That puts it in a category alongside Rocket Lab’s Electron and Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha vehicles aimed at the fast-growing market for dedicated small satellite launches. The key word is “dedicated.” Most small satellite operators today share rides on larger rockets, accepting launch windows and orbital inclinations that may not be ideal for their missions. Vikram-1 offers a different proposition: your satellite, your orbit, your schedule.
The cost-to-performance claim is the one Skyroot leans on hardest, a function of India’s lower manufacturing costs, the design choices made to simplify production, and eight years of iterative engineering. About a third of expected demand comes from Indian customers; the remaining two-thirds are international operators who see India not as a backup option but as a genuinely competitive launch market.
The Milestones That Got Them Here
What Comes After the Launch
The $60 million will fund two things. First: scaling manufacturing so that Vikram-1 can launch multiple times per year, not just once. Second: accelerating development of Vikram-2, a heavier vehicle powered by a cryogenic stage, targeting 2027. Vikram-2 will carry one-tonne class payloads— opening a larger slice of the satellite market and moving Skyroot into direct competition with a wider field of global players.
The backdrop matters here. India’s space economy, currently estimated at $8.4 billion, is projected to reach $44 billion by 2033. The country had nearly 400 space-tech startups by early 2026. ISRO, meanwhile, has faced two consecutive launch failures in recent missions— which has created both pressure and opportunity for companies like Skyroot to demonstrate that India’s private sector can deliver where the state has stumbled.
What Future Founders Should Take From This
Skyroot’s story is not a story about being in the right place at the right time, though timing helped. It’s a story about choosing a problem that is too hard for most people to bother with a sector with no private history, no legal framework, no comparable precedent in India and staying with it long enough for the world to catch up.
They did not pivot when the policy environment was uncertain. They did not rebrand as “deep tech” when that became fashionable. They built rockets. They tested engines. They asked permission for things no one had ever asked permission for. When the regulatory window opened, they were ready to walk through it.
There is a version of this story where one failed engine test, one bureaucratic setback, one investor who bailed in 2020 sends both founders back to ISRO with quiet embarrassment. That version almost certainly existed. It just didn’t happen to be the one they lived.
Vikram-1 is ready. India is watching. And somewhere in Hyderabad, two former ISRO engineers who once rented a garage to build a rocket are sleeping or not sleeping, the night before the rest of their story begins.