Kepler raises $8 mn to build swarm satellites for military surveillance

BENGALURU: Kepler Aerospace, a Bengaluru-based space infrastructure and mission operations startup, has raised $8 million in a seed round led by Blue Ashva Capital, with Finvolve and India Accelerator co-leading. It is the company’s first external funding round since it was founded in 2018, as well as among the largest seed rounds raised in Indian space-tech so far.The funds will go towards launching Kepler’s first six satellites, designed to operate as an autonomous “swarm” that can task each other in orbit without human intervention, as well as towards scaling its existing satellite-hardware and ground-infrastructure businesses.Kepler was founded by chief executive Navneet Singh and chief strategy officer Kiran Sharma, who met while working at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro). Singh worked on India’s nanosatellite programme at Isro. Sharma was part of a lunar nano-rover project at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.Kepler already holds two prime contracts under the government’s iDEX (Innovations for Defence Excellence) scheme to build swarming satellite constellations for India’s defence establishment, backed by about $4 million in iDEX grants awarded two years ago.Singh told TOI that Kepler has cleared the preliminary design review and mission design review for the satellites, with a critical design review targeted for January. The company has not yet finalised a launch provider and is in talks with multiple global and domestic players, Singh said, with a first launch targeted for December 2027.The satellites are meant for the Defence Space Agency, and will include electronic-warfare, electro-optical and thermal sensors that Singh said can autonomously detect a target, such as a ship or a mobile air-defence system, and cue other satellites in the cluster to image and track it, without waiting for a ground station. Singh said this could cut the time between detecting an object and delivering usable intelligence to forces from what he described as India’s current turnaround of about one-and-a-half months, down to a few hours. He contrasted this with China’s satellite network, which he said can refresh surveillance of India’s northern border areas roughly every eight minutes, a comparison, based on a much larger fleet size.Kepler’s older businesses, satellite components such as a sub-10-gram onboard GPS system, satellite communication hardware, military avionics, and “mission operations as a service” run through a network of over 70 ground stations, together made up about 90% of its roughly $1 million in revenue last year, Singh said. Its newer satellite-intelligence business contributed the rest. Singh expects intelligence services to grow to 60-70% of revenue within three years, once all six satellites are in orbit, an inflection point he expects around mid-2028. The company counts Isro, L&T, Bellatrix Aerospace and Take Me To Space among users of its satellite hardware, and Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL) and DRDO’s Aeronautical Development Establishment among clients for its avionics business, which includes the communication system on the Abhyas target drone.Kepler plans to add about 40 employees over the next 12-24 months and is moving into a new integration and mission-control facility in Bengaluru’s Whitefield area.Get the latest Business News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.