InspeCity Space Laboratories Bets ₹100 Crore on India's Satellite Repair Ambitions
An IIT-Bombay-incubated startup announced Tuesday it has raised ₹100 crore (roughly $10.5 million) to launch four satellite servicing missions over the next year and a half, positioning itself as India's first serious entrant in the fledgling business of repairing and refueling spacecraft already in orbit.
InspeCity Space Laboratories closed the pre-Series A round with Speciale Invest and investor Ashish Kacholia co-leading, joined by Antler Elevate, Antler India, Manish Gandhi, and Shastra VC. The capital will fund a rapid-fire sequence of orbital demonstrations that CEO Arindrajit Chowdhury says will prove India can compete in a market still largely defined by a handful of American players and a lot of unfulfilled promise.
The satellite servicing sector remains nascent. While U.S. companies like Northrop Grumman and Japan's Astroscale have garnered headlines with high-profile contracts, most of the work remains experimental. InspeCity is wagering it can leapfrog into relevance by flying not one but four missions in quick succession, each more complex than the last.
The first two flights, dubbed RIG-E and RIG-X, will demonstrate rendezvous and proximity operations around target spacecraft. The third mission, VEDA-X, will execute what the company calls a "handshake," a close approach maneuver that requires centimeter-level precision. The fourth, SAMA-X (Space-Based Maintenance Asset), will attempt autonomous docking.
"These are in the near term, in the next 12 to 18 months," Chowdhury said Tuesday.
If the timeline holds, InspeCity will have compressed years of orbital choreography into a compressed window, though space startups have a well-documented history of optimistic schedules. Chowdhury, a mechanical engineering professor at IIT Bombay, co-founded the company in 2022 alongside CTO Tausif Shaikh, an IIT Bombay alumnus.
The startup already has one piece of hardware in orbit. Its GITA propulsion unit launched aboard the Indian Space Research Organisation's PSLV-C58 mission on January 1, 2024, and has been operational for over a year. Chowdhury told Inc42 the company has cleared functional and environmental testing and secured approvals from ISRO's labs.
InspeCity is pursuing an unusual vertical integration strategy for a startup of its size. Rather than buying propulsion modules or navigation sensors off the shelf, the company is building everything in-house: GITA for propulsion, CHAKSU for AI-enabled sensing and navigation, RAMA for robotic manipulation, and VEDA as the servicing vehicle platform. "Robotics, RPO, propulsion and satellites should all be in-house," Chowdhury said, using the industry shorthand for rendezvous and proximity operations.
It's a capital-intensive approach, one that demands significant upfront investment before revenue materializes. But it also gives InspeCity tighter control over integration and performance—crucial in a business where millimeter-scale errors at orbital velocities can mean mission failure.
Speciale Invest, which has now backed InspeCity across three funding rounds, framed the strategy Tuesday as building "India's first integrated stack for in-space servicing," combining propulsion, sensing, and robotics into a unified platform.
The company appears to be banking on government contracts to sustain itself while the commercial market develops. InspeCity currently holds three projects under India's iDEX (Innovations for Defence Excellence) program and anticipates "significant government funding support," Chowdhury told Moneycontrol. The startup also won two Defence Space Agency challenges under iDEX Prime X.
With about 70 employees now, InspeCity plans to more than double headcount using the fresh capital. The funds will also support facility expansion and mission operations.
The global satellite servicing market remains more aspiration than reality. Northrop Grumman has flown life-extension missions to geostationary orbit, while Astroscale has pursued debris removal demonstrations. U.S. startup Starfish Space has been testing its Otter Pup docking system in low Earth orbit, and Orbit Fab has worked on refueling depot technology. Most of these efforts, however, remain in demonstration phases, with commercial viability still years away.
InspeCity raised $5.6 million in seed funding in May 2025, led by Kacholia with participation from Speciale Invest and Shastra VC, among others. An earlier $1.5 million pre-seed round closed in April 2023.
"When we started InspeCity, Earth 2.0 was deliberately a long-term thesis," Chowdhury told YourStory on Tuesday, alluding to the company's vision of building infrastructure for a future where satellites are maintained like cars rather than discarded when fuel runs low.
Whether InspeCity can execute four missions in 18 months while scaling its team and technology stack will test that thesis sooner than most space startups face. The sector has seen its share of delayed timelines and missed milestones. But with government backing and fresh capital in hand, the company is at least positioned to try.
