Thane, Maharashtra-based InspeCity, a space-tech startup incubated at IIT Bombay, has raised ₹100 crore (about $10.5 million) in a pre-Series A round co-led by Speciale Invest and veteran stock-picker Ashish Kacholia, the company confirmed on August 27. Antler India, Antler Elevate, Shastra VC and angel investor Manish Gandhi also participated, and InspeCity has not disclosed a post-money valuation for the round.
The raise follows a $5.6 million seed round in May 2025, also led by Kacholia, and a $1.5 million pre-seed round led by Speciale Invest in 2023. Total funding now stands near ₹150 crore. InspeCity said the capital will go towards flight-qualifying its in-space servicing technology and executing four in-orbit missions over the next 12 to 18 months, under a roadmap it calls RIG-X, VEDA-X and SAMA-X.
Founded in 2022 by Arindrajit Chowdhury, an IIT Bombay professor, Tausif Shaikh, Sanket Dash, and Ananth Ramesh, InspeCity builds in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM) technology aimed at extending satellite lifespans and cleanly deorbiting spacecraft at end of life. Its platform, VEDA (Vehicle for Life-Extension and Deorbiting Activities), is designed to rendezvous with a satellite, dock with it, and either refuel and reposition it or guide it to a controlled deorbit. The company has broken the problem into modules — GITA for propulsion, CHAKSU for sensing and navigation, RAMA for robotic manipulation, and SPARSH for docking and in-orbit refuelling — each validated separately before being assembled into a full servicing mission.
The four planned missions will test rendezvous and proximity operations, propulsion and robotics in orbit, InspeCity has said, as it works towards flight qualification for VEDA ahead of a demonstration mission previously slated for 2027. The company has also won contracts under India’s iDEX defence innovation programme and formed partnerships with space-tech players in Japan and Taiwan, giving it an early, if narrow, revenue base in government and defence R&D work while the commercial servicing market remains unproven.
Globally, InspeCity is chasing a market that companies including ClearSpace, Starfish Space and Astroscale are also pursuing, several with more capital and flight heritage already logged. In India, most well-funded space-tech names — Skyroot Aerospace, which became the country’s first spacetech unicorn earlier this year, and Agnikul among them — are concentrated in launch, leaving satellite servicing a comparatively open niche domestically. The compressed timeline is the clearest risk in the round: deep-tech hardware routinely slips, and a single failed in-orbit demonstration could reset both the roadmap and the case for InspeCity’s next fundraise.
