Skyroot Aerospace has become India’s first space-tech unicorn after raising a fresh $60 million funding round, taking its valuation to about $1.1 billion. The round was co-led by GIC and Sherpalo Ventures, with participation from BlackRock, the founders of Greenko Group, Arkam Ventures, Playbook Partners, Shanghvi Family Office, and several other investors. This latest round pushes Skyroot’s total funding to around $160 million, marking a sharp jump in valuation from about $519 million in 2023 to unicorn status in 2026.
Founded in 2018 by former ISRO engineers, Skyroot started out as a deep-tech startup aiming to build privately developed orbital launch vehicles in India, at a time when the country’s space sector was still tightly government-dominated. The company was incubated at T-Hub in Hyderabad and quickly gained attention for its propulsion-first approach, focusing early efforts on solid rocket motors and modular launch vehicle design that could scale into full orbital systems.
The startup’s early funding journey started on a relatively modest scale, with seed capital of a few million dollars around 2020 to support initial research and early engineering development. This was followed by a Series A round of about $11 million in 2021, which helped Skyroot set up its core R&D infrastructure, expand its engineering team, and begin focused work on rocket propulsion systems and testing.
In 2022, Skyroot raised a much larger Series B round of around $51 million, marking a key turning point in its growth. This round brought in major institutional investors like GIC and allowed Skyroot to significantly accelerate development of its flagship launch vehicle program, Vikram-1, moving deeper into integrated system design and testing. Then in 2023, the company secured a pre-Series C round of about $27.5 million, led by Temasek. This round pushed total funding close to the $100 million mark and supported more advanced testing, including full system integration work across its launch vehicle stack.
The company’s technical milestone came in November 2022 with the launch of Vikram-S, which became the first privately built Indian rocket to reach space in a sub-orbital mission. Skyroot’s main focus now is Vikram-1, a small satellite launch vehicle designed to carry payloads of roughly 300-480 kg to low Earth orbit. The rocket is being developed for the global small-satellite market, which is expanding rapidly due to demand from telecom, Earth observation, and defense sectors. The company is also working on Vikram-2, a larger next-generation launch vehicle intended to increase payload capacity and reduce per-kilogram launch costs.
Financially, Skyroot remains in a pre-revenue commercialization phase, with estimates placing annual revenue in the low single-digit million-dollar range. And like most deep-tech space companies, its valuation is driven primarily by future launch potential rather than current earnings.
It is worth noting that India’s private space-tech sector has become increasingly competitive, with several startups building in parallel across launch vehicles, satellite manufacturing, and propulsion systems. Companies like Skyroot Aerospace, Agnikul Cosmos, Pixxel, Bellatrix Aerospace, and Dhruva Space are all racing to develop commercially viable space capabilities, ranging from orbital rocket launches to Earth observation satellites and in-space propulsion technologies. This becomes even more notable as the Indian space economy, which is currently estimated at around $8-9 billion, is projected to grow to around $40-50 billion by 2030.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
