Pawan Kumar ChandanaCo-founder & CEO

I am still out of words because the launch curves were spot-on matching our trajectory. Reaching orbit successfully on the very first attempt is a phenomenal, historic milestone for India and the global space sector, especially since even SpaceX required multiple attempts to achieve this feat.

The team was highly excited because they trusted their systems after a month of intense preparation at the launch site. Although I kept public expectations low by reminding everyone that first launches statistically have low success rates, watching the pitch-perfect liftoff was a surreal experience.

He watched the launch live, despite having back-to-back meetings and a thirty-minute timeline slippage. When I took his call, the ringtone was Vande Matram. He congratulated us on this major national milestone, sent a handwritten Vande Matram card, and praised the entire Skyroot team.

I was a user of Myntra products and reached out to Mukesh Bansal on LinkedIn without expecting much since I was a naive twenty-seven-year-old. He responded immediately, and we met that weekend. We had a clear technical frequency match on the whiteboard, sketching out our plans.

I wanted to make concentrated, high-conviction bets rather than spreading small checks across many companies. Having watched SpaceX and loving science, I wanted to back an Indian private space company. Pawan and Bharat had done their homework and showed deep conviction through their body language.

Building a rocket takes at least ten years. If the founders had told me they would try for two to three years and see what happened, I would not have invested. Their willingness to dedicate the rest of their lives to the mission was the ultimate clincher.

Raising our Series A right as COVID hit. Funding priorities changed, seed capital was running out, and we faced a high chance of shutting down. Mukesh Bansal provided two crores of additional bridge funding, and early investor Anil put in three crores to keep us afloat.

Before GIC came in, the investment community was highly skeptical that a pre-revenue deep tech startup could raise growth capital. GIC's investment was completely revolutionary, closing two months before our first suborbital launch and showing that large institutional funds would back hard science.

In 2018, building rockets privately was semi-illegal because there was no policy allowing private entities to launch. We were allowed to design and build in our backyard, but the privatization of space in 2020 provided the regulatory clarity needed to launch legally.

ISRO went out of their way to support us. They provided access to their launch pads, test facilities, and continuous design reviews. The entire wisdom of the Indian space sector and government infrastructure came together to ensure the success of our mission.

I am paranoid by nature, which is a great asset in rocket engineering because the smallest scratch can cause a catastrophic failure. We study past failure modes meticulously, build a culture of paranoia within the engineering team, and design reliability directly into the components.

The first stage lifts the fifty-ton rocket through the thickest part of Earth's atmosphere up to fifty kilometers. Within the first hundred seconds, the vehicle experiences maximum aerodynamic pressure, heavy structural loads, and intense vibrations, which we cleared successfully.

At t-minus eleven minutes, the computer takes complete control of the vehicle, and human operators cannot intervene. The system monitors hundreds of parameters, and if any reading falls out of bounds or gives a spooky signal, it automatically holds the launch.

The automatic launch sequence detected a minor software mismatch where the computer's past memory did not align with current data. It was not a hardware failure, so once we cleared the memory mismatch and restarted, the sequence resumed and worked perfectly.

The liquid-fueled module handles the final stage of flight, adjusting the velocity precisely because missing the target by even ten meters per second prevents orbit. It uses over twenty valves acting in milliseconds to execute a nominal cutoff once the payload coordinates are reached.

We invested a large portion of our sixty to seventy million dollars of funding into building manufacturing capacity for the future. Our factory is fully equipped to build one rocket a month, putting us in an exclusive global club alongside SpaceX and Rocket Lab.

Vikram-1 will remain our workhorse, and we aim to scale its payload capacity to three hundred kilograms. We are designing Vikram-2 with a cryogenic stage to deliver a ton of payload, and we target developing a reusable vehicle within this decade.

Sourcing ninety percent of our components in India proves that deep tech and hard engineering can be executed locally. India cannot rely on importing billions of dollars of defense and space products, and Skyroot demonstrates that indigenous IP is entirely achievable.