The country’s spacetech ecosystem would witness the emergence of multiple unicorns before 2030, one of the earliest investors in the domain has said.
“I am convinced that we will have at least three to four unicorns emerging in India’s spacetech industry in another five years,” partner at the multi-million venture capital fund Kalaari Capital, Ravinder Pal Singh told Business Today during an exclusive interaction.
Those unicorns would be emerging in different industry segments. Interestingly, contrary to most expectations this wouldn’t be restricted to the area of launch vehicles or rockets.
“You cannot expect multiple unicorns to emerge in the area of launch vehicles. While there is this romantic vision that startups can beat ISRO either on technology or economies of scale, it’s not going to be easy,” averred Singh.
“From a unit economics perspective, there is a place for utilising better technologies to reduce launch time of a launch vehicle. But I don’t see more than one unicorn coming out of this segment. But there are companies in space situational awareness, data intelligence and perceptive defence warfare that will quickly become unicorns,” he added.
Singh had led Kalaari Capital’s investments in the space situational awareness firm Digantara Research & Technologies, which was among the first to successfully demonstrate their proof of concepts last year.
Reiterating an important data point from his own research shared with BT earlier, he said in the past decade nearly $27 billion was invested in the space sector globally. Today, the combined value of that investment is close to $4 trillion. Therefore, despite the highly capital-intensive nature of the business, investors and large industries must seriously start focussing on it.
“If you look at space from the insurance industry perspective, it is not even tapped. Imagine if somebody can provide better visibility and transparency not only for objects in space but also for objects on the Earth, that will be a huge thing. A similar thing would be the air-to-land transactions or the communication that happens between nations. They are currently very expensive and satellites can help resolve that issue,” observed Singh.
He said going forward the spacetech sector could potentially disrupt every sector of the economy from agriculture to energy. Welcoming the recent approval by the government of the Indian Space Policy, Singh was hopeful that it would help in pushing up investments in the sector.
“One of the major reasons why investments don’t really happen in any domain, specifically space and defence is because of opaqueness. So, even if the policy bill wasn’t a perfect document, the approved policy should help clarify the regulatory framework and the segments the government is keen to promote. So, that’s great news,” he said.
Singh was in New Delhi to attend the three-day ‘Indian DefSpace Symposium’ organised by the apex industry body Indian Space Association (ISpA).
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