Tripling down on our conviction in InspeCity in its INR 100Cr Pre-Series A Round
Updated: Aug 31
We're excited to be co-leading in InspeCity's INR 100Cr Pre-Series A round, tripling down on a company we first backed in 2023 and again in 2025. InspeCity is building India's first integrated stack for in-space servicing — propulsion, sensing, and robotics — the capabilities that let a satellite move, see, and act once it's already in orbit.
Our conviction rested on a simple observation: as more satellites go up, someone will need to service, refuel, inspect, and eventually deorbit them. In 2023, very few teams anywhere were building toward that, and almost none from India. Dr. Arindrajit Chowdhury and his team at InspeCity were the exception — and they chose the hardest possible path: building the core subsystems themselves rather than integrating someone else's.
Most companies attempting this pick one layer — propulsion, or sensing, or robotics — and stop there. InspeCity is building all three under one roof, plus the satellite bus that houses them: GITA for propulsion, CHAKSU for rendezvous and proximity sensing, RAMA for robotic manipulation, and VEDA to carry them. That's a harder path — four companies in one — but owning all four matters for a specific reason. In-space servicing isn't a product, it's a sequence: reach the target, see and approach it precisely, then physically interact with it. The failure modes live in the handoffs between those steps. A team that owns the interfaces can close those loops in the lab instead of across three vendor contracts. It's slower and more capital-hungry to reach the first flight — and much harder for anyone to replicate once you're there.
The timing has also shifted in the company's favour since 2023. Sovereign demand for satellite inspection and debris management has moved from a research conversation to an active procurement priority, visible in the steady run of iDEX challenges India's defence establishment has released over the past few years for exactly these capabilities. That same shift is why the underlying technology — precision rendezvous, proximity operations, robotic manipulation — has a second, adjacent use case in space situational awareness, which we think adds to the company's addressable market rather than replacing our original thesis.
That iDEX pipeline has also become a real funding advantage: InspeCity has won a series of grants across sensing, micro-propulsion, and space robotics, bringing in tens of crores of rupees in non-dilutive capital that has gone directly into de-risking the technology stack without touching the cap table. On the commercial side, the company has moved from subsystem R&D in 2023 to demonstrated on-ground validation of its propulsion, sensing, and robotics stacks — progress that's translated into InspeCity's letters of intent and commercial contracts from customers in India and abroad.
The founders are a real part of why we keep re-upping. Dr. Arindrajit Chowdhury, Dr. Tausif Shaikh have built a leadership team with Ananth Ramesh and Sanket Dash spanning R&D, business development, and international expansion, while Dr. Arin has personally taken on the work of coordinating across private, government, and defence stakeholders — a genuinely different skill from the technical one. Founders who can hold both the deep technical thread and the institutional relationship thread are rare in deep tech, and rarer still in defence-adjacent deep tech, where sales cycles run in years and relationships can't be shortcut.
The next year is the one that matters most: InspeCity's next mission will be the first in-orbit validation of its sensing and propulsion stack, with the robotics stack to follow. That's the milestone that converts LOIs into contracts and sets up the path to Series A.
Building space hardware that has to work the first time, in an environment you cannot fully test for on the ground, is genuinely hard — and India has very few companies attempting it end to end. We're proud to keep backing InspeCity as it takes that next step.
If you're building in space technology or the broader deep tech ecosystem, we'd love to hear from you at info@specialeinvest.com.
