India's first private rocket reached orbit — from a company that existed before the law did.

I went down a rabbit hole on this one, and I have to tell you — it was epic. I sat down to write about a rocket launch and ended up in 1948, reading letters between a physicist and a prime minister. Stay with me, because the backstory is the story.

Here's the gap that pulled me in. Skyroot was founded in 2018. India didn't open space to private companies until 2020. So for two years, a company existed to do something the country had no legal way to permit — not because it was banned, but because nobody had ever written the law that could allow it.

Why India couldn't say yes

To understand why a private rocket was unthinkable for so long, you have to go back to before there was much of an India to launch from.

In 1948, a year after independence, the physicist Homi Bhabha wrote to Prime Minister Nehru arguing that atomic energy would decide which nations got rich. Nehru — a Cambridge science man who preached "scientific temper" as a civic virtue — agreed, and created an Atomic Energy Commission under Bhabha. In 1954, the government stood up a Department of Atomic Energy by presidential order, placed directly under the Prime Minister: privileged funding, secrecy, no ministry in between.

India's space program was born inside that department. In 1962, Vikram Sarabhai's team began not as an agency but as a committee — INCOSPAR — housed within Atomic Energy. Launch and the bomb shared a roof from the start. When Bhabha died in a 1966 plane crash, Sarabhai took over the Atomic Energy Commission too — so for a time, one man ran India's space program and its nuclear program. INCOSPAR became ISRO in 1969; a separate Department of Space wasn't carved out until 1972, a full decade inside the nuclear establishment.

Then the law. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty — India signed it that year — makes every nation responsible for its citizens' activity in space, and requires private launches to be authorised and supervised. In plain terms: each country has to pass its own law to license a private rocket. The United States did in 1984. India never did. No statute, no authority that could say yes — a monopoly by omission rather than by decree.

And nobody rushed to change it, because of what these rockets are. India's first satellite launcher, the SLV-3, reached orbit in 1980 under project director A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. Kalam then carried its first stage straight into the Agni missile, which flew in 1989. Most countries build ballistic missiles first and derive space rockets from them; India did it backwards — built the launcher, then weaponised it. You don't hand technology like that to a startup on a whim. Even now, foreign investment in Indian launch companies is capped at 49%, against 74% for satellites — the gap is the dual-use anxiety, written into policy.

The founders who didn't wait

Skyroot's two founders came out of ISRO — the CEO worked on India's heavy-lift programme before leaving in 2018 to start the company. Their bet was audacious precisely because it was legal, not technical: build the company, and dare the rules to arrive. As the CEO later put it, when the idea took root, Indian law simply did not permit it.

Notice what they built first, though — not a rocket, a company. From 2018 to 2020, it was design and propulsion research. Every piece of hardware came after the reform: India's first privately developed liquid rocket engine, with a fully 3D-printed injector, in late 2020. The country's first privately built solid stage, weeks later. A suborbital test flight in 2022. Capability and permission arrived almost in step — the reform came in two years, not the decade they'd braced for.

What flew

Mission Aagaman — Sanskrit for "arrival" — lifted off from Sriharikota on 18 July after a 35-minute hold, and reached about 450 km some fifteen minutes later. Two things make Vikram-1 unusual: its airframe is carbon composite top to bottom — among the few all-composite orbital rockets flying anywhere — and its kick-stage engines are 3D-printed. It lifts around 350 kg to low Earth orbit, but the real design goal is speed: solid stages need no pad fuelling, so Skyroot says the whole vehicle can be assembled and launched within 24 hours. It markets the thing as "cabs to orbit."

It wasn't an empty test flight, either. Vikram-1 carried real payloads: small satellites from Indian startups, a robotic arm built to practise catching space debris, and hardware from a German company. That last one matters — a maiden flight is the one most likely to fail, so customers usually wait until a rocket is proven before trusting it with real hardware. A foreign company putting its kit on Vikram-1's first launch was a bet on Skyroot, not just a booking. It also carried a bit of theatre: a lotus of 32 lab-grown diamonds, and a handwritten postcard from Prime Minister Modi. It flew 46 years to the day after India first reached orbit on its own rocket. The CEO, after a call from Modi: "I never thought it was possible, but the Skyroot team made it possible."

Why one small rocket matters

The significance isn't Skyroot by itself — it's that Vikram-1 showed everyone else the door is open, and India has a lot of everyone else. Agnikul, another Indian startup, has already flown the world's first single-piece 3D-printed rocket engine. A maiden flight proves the route works; the hundreds of companies behind it are what turn a proof into an industry.

Think of it as two halves. Vikram-1 just built one of them — cheap, private, repeatable access to space. The other half is the people who turn that access into a business, and that's the part this newsletter keeps circling back to. Dr. Bidushi Bhattacharya says the industry needs financiers, lawyers and marketers as much as engineers; Cedric Ng of Space Faculty is training exactly those people. Put the two together — the rockets, and the people who sell what they carry — and you get the engine India is banking on to grow its space economy from about $8 billion today to $44 billion by 2033.

The groundwork is already there. In 2014, India had one registered space startup; today it has more than 400, and private investment has crossed $600 million since the 2020 reforms.

Who paid for it

The money behind Vikram-1 is its own story, and it starts with a cold LinkedIn message. When CEO Pawan Chandana went looking for his first cheque, he's said he Googled how to raise capital, wasn't sure what equity even was, and messaged the entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal on LinkedIn. Bansal became Skyroot's sole early backer.

The rounds — roughly $160 million in all:

• 2018–2020 — Mukesh Bansal, personally: about ₹12.3 crore across three rounds, the only investor in the early days. Reportedly around a 5.7% stake today.
• 2020 — a COVID-era bridge from the founders of green-energy firm Greenko.
• July 2021 — $11M Series A, led by the Greenko founders, with Solar Industries (India's largest industrial-explosives maker) joining.
• September 2022 — $51M Series B, led by GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund.
• October 2023 — $27.5M, led by Temasek — Singapore again.
• May 2026 — ~$60M at a $1.1 billion valuation, co-led by Sherpalo Ventures (Ram Shriram, an early Google backer) and GIC, plus ~$10M of BlackRock-linked debt. India's first space-tech unicorn.

Read that list back and the twist jumps out. India guarded launch as a state monopoly for fifty years on sovereignty grounds. When it finally opened the gate, the two biggest institutional backers were GIC and Temasek — both arms of the Singapore government. There's no Indian state money on the cap table at all: the capability is Indian, the largest cheques belong to another country's sovereign funds.

And it's all standing on soft ground, because India still has no space law. IN-SPACe authorises launches but, by its own account, lacks statutory backing; a finalised bill has been pending since 2025. A $1.1 billion company that lost nearly ₹100 crore last year and hasn't sold a commercial launch is flying on foreign capital and executive policy. Impressive — and unfinished.

Spot the startup

One of these Indian space companies is invented. Which? Answer at the bottom.

• a) Skyroot — small-lift launch vehicles
• b) Agnikul — 3D-printed rocket engines
• c) Pixxel — hyperspectral Earth-observation satellites
• d) Garuda Orbital — crewed re-entry capsules

What to do with this

• Investors — India is where Asia's private-launch bet is actually flying. But read the cap table: Indian capability, Singaporean state capital. The upside and the vulnerability are the same fact.
• Founders — the lesson is that Skyroot existed before the law did, and regulation followed capability. If you're waiting for perfect rules, someone who isn't is already ahead of you.
• Policymakers — six years of reform produced 400 startups, $600M and a unicorn without a statute. The 49% launch cap and the missing law are the two visible brakes; both push your best rocket companies to raise abroad.
• Precious subscribers — watch cadence, not the maiden flight. One rocket is a milestone. One rocket a month, copied by 400 startups, is an industry.

The rocket is the headline. The model is the story: engineers who built a company the law didn't permit, and dared the system to catch up. It did. Somebody's next launch just got cheaper.

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Last issue: Building a rocket is not the only way into space — Hong Kong mapped it 5 ways.

(The fake: (d). India has no private crewed-capsule startup — human spaceflight is still ISRO's alone. The other three are real, and flying.)

Cheers!

— shirley