At the Union Budget 2024, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, announced an impressive budget allocation of INR 1000 Crores for boosting space technology. The space economy is expected to expand by five times in the next 10 years.
“The 1000 Cr fund of funds for space tech is testimonial to India’s capability in coming up with breakthrough solutions at low cost. This will certainly help space tech companies to look for much needed early stage capital to get started,” said Anil Joshi, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures.
On Monday, the Economic Survey 2023-24 was tabled in the Parliament by Sitharaman that spoke about the impressive growth in the space sector. India has 55 space assets that includes 18 communication satellites, nine navigation satellites, five scientific satellites, three meteorological satellites, and 20 earth observation satellites.
“As a deep tech focused VC fund, FM announcing Rs 1000 crore space economy VC fund and R&D fund of Rs 1 lakh crore will work as a strong catalyst for startups in deeptech and space tech,” said Manoj Agarwal, Managing Partner, Seafund.
Accelerating Indian Space Startups
As of January 1, 51 MoUs and 34 joint project implementation plans have been signed with various non-governmental entities. Srinath Ravichandran, co-founder and CEO, Agnikul Cosmos, an emerging spacetech startup, said, “Wonderful news for all of us in the sector. This will help larger players emerge out of India’s space startup ecosystem. This also shows that the government is continuing to strongly back its vision of making India have a larger chunk of the global space economy.”
New Space India Limited (NSIL) successfully launched 72 OneWeb satellites into Low Earth Orbit using LVM3 missions M2 and M3, cementing LVM3's reliability in the global commercial launch services market. Interestingly, Rivada Space Networks, is also working on low-earth orbit satellites,and they wish to expand that to India in the future.
AWS also has a program promoting space tech, where they recently selected 24 India startups for their first country-specific space accelerator program.
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