A three-year-old Chennai startup building liquid rocket engines has secured an undisclosed investment from the IITM Unicorn Frontier Fund, the company said last week, as part of a ₹55 crore deployment the fund spread across four deep-tech ventures. Hathor Rockets declined to specify its share, though the fund typically writes initial checks of around ₹10 crore at seed to pre-Series A stages, according to the Times of India.
The investment puts Hathor, which develops semi-cryogenic and cryogenic propulsion systems, in a small cohort of Indian startups trying to solve what founder Veerappan Chatram Kaliappan Keerthivarman frames as an infrastructure problem. Building rocket engines from scratch typically takes six to eight years and burns through $100 million or more, Keerthivarman told NDTV—time and capital that launch-vehicle startups and mid-sized aerospace contractors often lack.
Hathor's pitch centers on ready-to-integrate propulsion. Its modular HTR-GXP engines, still under development, target launch companies, in-space mobility platforms and strategic applications, according to an NDTV video published in mid-September. The company is working on both semi-cryogenic and cryogenic variants, propellants that power some of the most efficient rocket stages flying today.
The startup's operational footprint remains murky. Corporate filings list a registered office in Erode, Tamil Nadu, while its LinkedIn page cites Chennai as headquarters. Hathor also appears tied to the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology's incubation center in Thiruvananthapuram, where the IIST Space Technology Innovation and Incubation Centre website currently lists the company as "ready to pre-incubate." An IIST annual report from April 2024 noted that Hathor demonstrated a mini rocket thruster at a March 2024 event co-hosted by the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, though the report is now over a year old, raising questions about how current the information remains.
Keerthivarman, who founded Hathor in June 2023, serves as CEO. Karuppanaicker Kaliappan Srishindhuja is listed as co-director in filings with India's Registrar of Companies. LinkedIn shows the company in the 2-10 employee range. Recent job postings for propulsion engineer and business development roles describe Hathor as operating in "stealth mode," a characterization that tracks with the limited public information available. The postings reference customer discovery, partnership development and drafting proposals for government grants—activities that suggest pre-revenue operations. The company has not disclosed contracted customers or named partners.
The IITM Unicorn Frontier Fund, a collaboration between IIT Madras, IIT Madras Research Park and Unicorn India Ventures, reached a ₹453 crore first close in three months. V Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras, called it a "record first close" in a late September Times of India report. Bhaskar Majumdar, managing partner at Unicorn India Ventures, said the fund aims to "provide early founders with the capital and support needed to scale and build globally competitive companies from India."
Hathor joined three other portfolio companies in the fund's initial deployment, all spacetech or quantum-application firms whose names appeared across multiple September reports in the Times of India, Inc42 and the New Indian Express. The precise date of those reports appears inconsistent across sources.
India's private spacetech sector has pulled in steady early-stage capital recently. Skyroot Aerospace became the country's first space unicorn in May with a roughly $60 million round at a reported $1.1 billion valuation, the Economic Times wrote. Propulsion-focused peers have raised smaller amounts: BAAS Technologies landed ₹5 crore in July, Dream Aerospace secured ₹10 crore in June, and Trishul Space closed a ₹4 crore pre-seed late last year.
Bengaluru-based Astrobase unveiled a full-flow staged-combustion engine called Everest in August, framing propulsion development as a shared infrastructure challenge for the sector. Globally, U.S. startup Juno Propulsion raised $1.4 million in June for in-space propulsion. Rocket Lab introduced an electric thruster in the spring to address what it called constellation bottlenecks.
Natarajan Malupillai, group CEO of IIT-M Research Park, positioned the fund's ambition beyond individual deals. "Our ambition is to strengthen India's tech capabilities, build self-reliance in critical sectors and position India as a source of frontier technologies for the world," Malupillai said in the September Times of India article.
Whether Hathor can deliver on its promise of off-the-shelf propulsion remains an open question. The company has yet to announce flight-proven hardware or partnerships with launch providers, the typical milestones that separate propulsion concepts from credible suppliers in a sector where reliability outweighs almost every other metric.
