This edition of Tigerfeathers is presented in partnership with…Lightspeed India

Lightspeed is a global multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise, Consumer, Health, and Fintech sectors. Over the last two decades, the firm has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs around the world and helped build companies of tomorrow. Globally, Lightspeed’s teams manage more than $25 billion in investments across its platform, with investment professionals and advisors in India, Silicon Valley, Israel, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe.

Lightspeed has a long-standing and deep presence in India and Southeast Asia, with offices and advisory teams based in Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Singapore. The dedicated India and SEA fund continues to support entrepreneurs shaping the future, including Acceldata, Razorpay, PhysicsWallah, ShareChat, OYO Rooms, Zepto, Sarvam AI and Darwinbox. (At Tigerfeathers last year we covered the stories of two of their portfolio companies – Pepper Content and NextBillion.ai).

In 2023 the firm announced the launch of a new $500 million fund focused on India and Southeast Asia. It’s their largest ever vehicle for the region, predicated on helping its most audacious founders tackle newer and harder problems in areas like Defence, Robotics, CleanTech, SpaceTech and AI Infrastructure.

The Lightspeed team has some of the sharpest thinkers (and best writers in the Indian tech ecosystem). They’re also fans of what we do at Tigerfeathers. So when I was in Bangalore back in July, I got to chatting with Lightspeed’s Hemant Mohapatra about working together on an essay about one of their investee companies – ideally one that was solving a ‘hard’ problem that would make for an epic story. It took us less than three seconds to settle on Pixxel, an Indian startup whose founders have been in the international limelight since they were college students back in 2017.

As you’ll find out, with their current venture, the Pixxel team isn’t restricting their ambitions to India, or even just to Earth. Their goal is to eventually become a fixture in the global space economy, helping to usher humanity towards an interstellar future. For reasons that will become obvious, Pixxel has been on our list of ‘Indian startups to write about’ since Day 1 at Tigerfeathers, so this one has been a long time coming. Enjoy!

More on Lightspeed India

Okay, let’s say you’ve been feeling terrible for the last month.

Terrible, not in a my-girlfriend-broke-up-with-me kind of way, but more in a my-insides-might-be-literally-on-fire kind of way.

So you pay a visit to your regular family doctor…who isn’t that helpful.

So you try another doctor, one who actually went to medical school.

Worth a 5/5 Trip Advisor rating.

Now let’s replace ‘you’ in the panel above with ‘The Earth’, and let’s replace the competent medical professional with ‘Pixxel’.

Pixxel wants to help The Earth diagnose problems that are invisible to the human eye. To do this, they’ve built a fleet of satellites equipped with special cameras that together function like a giant MRI machine for the planet. These cameras – called ‘hyperspectral’ cameras – can capture images across a vast expanse of the electromagnetic spectrum. If you’ve never encountered the word ‘hyperspectral’ before and you don’t know what an electromagnetic spectrum is, don’t worry. All it means is that Pixxel’s cameras can spot details that go beyond the abilities of our phone cameras or the naked eye (just like in the comic strip above).

These hyperspectral images – besides making for great Pink Floyd album covers – reveal hidden secrets about everyday phenomena on Earth, like depicting the level of algal bloom in a water body, or the presence of a methane leak from a gas pipeline, or the spread of pest infestation over a section of farmland.

In their own words, Pixxel wants to use the data from this hyperspectral fleet to build ‘a health monitor for the planet’. (FYI a fleet of satellites is generally referred to as a ‘constellation’ of satellites – sounds fancier, I guess).

It’s an idea that the founders of the company – Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal – came up with when they were still in their third year of university at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, Rajasthan.

Awais and Kshitij

Their primary objective is to build a sustainable business on the back of the images and insights generated by their satellites. But their grand vision is to eventually turn these cameras outwards, towards the cosmos, using the same technology to examine the make-up of space-objects like asteroids and planets, with the aim of helping humanity find the materials it needs to build habitable biomes outside of Earth. No biggie.

As it turns out, Pixxel is only narrowly the coolest thing that Awais and Kshitij worked on at BITS. Before starting up, they were both part of the historic Hyperloop India team, made up of Indian college students that banded together to answer a global engineering challenge posed by none other than Elon Musk.

The Pixxel team boasts a formidable engineering pedigree and a ‘why not us’ approach that they’ve inherited from their Hyperloop experience. Their company is now five years into its mission to give the planet a more honest mirror to gaze into, to get a fresh perspective on the good, bad, and ugly bits of life on Earth.

Outside of their own efforts, Pixxel’s spaceship is today also being propelled by the tailwind of a new Indian Space Policy (2003). This set of guidelines, formally announced last year, is intended to open the floodgates of India’s space arena to private entrepreneurship and ingenuity. It’s the official starting gun for a new era of ‘space-tech’ in India, ensuring that the country’s much vaunted space prowess can keep pace amidst a global renaissance for commercial space activity.

Amidst a renewed interest in all things interstellar from both investors and entrepreneurs alike, Pixxel has the chance to play a protagonist role in India’s modern space opera. Their first half-decade of operations has seen them prove their technology with the help of three demo satellites. On the back of that, just this year alone they’ve managed to secure deals with the likes of NASA and the Indian Air Force to support Earth science research and manufacture satellites respectively (amongst a slew of other commercial milestones). TIME magazine even selected their hyperspectral satellites as one of the best inventions of 2023.

The company is now gearing up to launch a full-fledged constellation of 24 satellites into orbit over the next 18 months. Having watched their story unfold from afar, it’s been a treat getting to interview the company’s founders, engineers and key executives for this piece, with the added bonus of spending time at their freshly minted spacecraft manufacturing facility in the middle of Bangalore.

The Pixxel team says that it’s less complicated to design, build, and launch a
satellite into space than it is to find an Uber to the office in the morning.

As they await the launch of the first six of those satellites into Earth’s orbit early next year, it seemed like the perfect juncture to take stock of their journey so far, and understand what’s at stake as the pieces of the Pixxel puzzle start to fall into place. So, today’s edition of Tigerfeathers will broadly cover:

• an introduction to the ‘New Space’ age
• the journey of the Pixxel founding team, and how they made it here
• what they’re building, and why hyperspectral imaging is the next frontier for earth observation

Before we begin, here’s our usual disclaimer/apology – this is not the kind of piece you can finish over a single bathroom break (unless it’s a really big one). My goal was to comprehensively tell the story of one of the most interesting companies in India that’s tackling some of the most pressing problems on the planet, while operating in one of the most unforgiving technological domains there is. It’s a story that merits proper telling.

Should you make it to the end, you might find that you’ve aged several months (or years). But, in your silver-foxed wisdom, you will have also acquired a deep insight into what it takes to make it to space, and why anyone should bother attempting to leave Earth in the first place.

As always, let us know what you think in the comments or by replying to this email. With that, our story begins.

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“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

There is an alternate version of our present reality where the front page of every newspaper on Earth is reserved to cover what humans did in space that day.

In that version of the world, space is The Thing That Matters.

It’s what everyone is working for and working towards.

It’s the only way to answer all the big hairy questions that afflict humanity on an existential basis. Like, who are we? Why are we here? What’s the meaning of all this? Why do I need CRED to pay my credit card bills? The really big ones.

It’s because space is a human-level question. It’s why we get to claim joint ownership whenever one of us gets closer to finding an answer.

Everyone on Earth doesn’t get license to celebrate when Argentina wins the World Cup or if Apple sells a million iPhones in Q1. But no one’s going to look at you sideways if you say ‘We made it to the moon’. Because zoom out far enough on our evolutionary timescale where tribes and allies and countries fade away, and every member of Team Human gets to say “We” did that.

It would be fair to say, though, that in our hyper-zoomed in versions of reality, space doesn’t carry the same conversational gravitas it once did. It doesn’t dominate everyday pop culture like sports or politics or the stock market. For most people, it doesn’t represent a permanent section of our cognitive furniture (at most it’s something of a plastic chair you rent for a night every few months).

If I may, I have three theories for why that’s the case. A lot of this stems from reflecting on my own intermittent phases of space infatuation while putting together this piece. So..

*clears throat*

…here goes:

Theory #1 – ‘You can’t see me’

Picture this. You’ve been teleported back into pre-Columbus Mexico. You’re standing at the foot of the Temple of Kukulcan in Chichen Itza, the ancient Mayan city, which was built sometime between 800 and 1200 AD.

Source

This monument – part of an UNESCO World Heritage Site – isn’t just an architectural marvel. It’s a cosmic calculator etched in stone. During equinoxes, the play of light and shadow creates the illusion of a serpent descending the pyramid’s steps – a feat of astronomical precision that would make modern astrophysicists blush. What’s more, the temple’s four sides have 91 steps each, which, along with the top platform totals 365 steps – mirroring our solar year with stone age accuracy.

These weren’t just party tricks either. The Mayans used their systems of mathematics, timekeeping and astronomy to create calendars more accurate than the ones you have on your smartphone (causing millions of people around the world to lose their shit in 2012). They tracked the path of Venus within an error of just two hours in 500 years. Without telescopes, computers, or even the wheel, they mapped the heavens with unfathomable precision.

If you were trying to deduce the reason for their astronomical prowess based just off the picture above, you wouldn’t understand how or why they got so good at studying the universe…

Image credit: piotreknik/Shutterstock

…until someone turned off the lights.

It’s no coincidence that some of the oldest civilisations in the world, from the banks of the Indus to the highlands of Peru, all had rich astronomical traditions. The Egyptians used stars to orient their pyramids. Our Vedic sages composed texts on celestial observations. Babylonian priests tracked planetary movements on clear desert nights, laying the groundwork for modern astronomy. In those days, stargazing was more than a spectacle. It was a game of survival, spirituality, and science – all rolled into one.

Fast forward to today. Most of us live in cities, where the night sky is obscured by a parmesan-shaded haze from buildings and street lights. We’ve built our cities skyward, but walled ourselves off from the cosmos. Ancient civilisations had monuments to commune with the stars; we have skyscrapers that obscure them.

We’re rarely ever face to face with space. We miss the visceral ‘What’s out there?’ punch that used to hit humans square in the jaw every time the sun went down. Without that daily reminder of our place in the universe, space becomes abstract, irrelevant, distant. Given we spend vastly more time bathed in the glow of our laptop screens than the night sky, it’s no wonder that kids would rather be influencers than astronauts.

Theory #2 – ‘Ain’t nobody got time for that’

We are oversaturated. While we rightly stop to celebrate seminal events like India’s landing of the Chandrayaan-3 vehicle on the south pole of the moon (2023), or the entry of its Mangalyaan spacecraft into Mars’ orbit (2014), the more routine updates from space get lost in the cacophony of our timelines.

The day to day cosmic grind just isn’t that algorithm-friendly. The acronyms are intimidating. The significance of certain numbers and milestones is hard to distil. It means we don’t often appreciate the incremental steps that lead to the giant leaps in space, which brings us to…

Open Secret #1 – Humans are getting exceedingly comfortable within the confines of space.

Depending on who you ask, we are either 10 or 20 years into the start of a new space age (colloquially and unimaginatively referred to as ‘New Space’). The main plotline underpinning the New Space era is the exponential reduction in the costs of sending people and things into space.

There’s been a 95%+ reduction in the per kg cost of sending something to space from the Space Race era in the 60s to present day

And because we can’t help ourselves, as the costs of breaking and entering into orbit have vastly reduced, humans have begun to hurl more of their stuff into space. Satellites, fuel stations, laboratories, data centres, giant mirrors, your ex-boyfriend’s playstation…it’s all fair game now.

We are in the midst of setting up a thriving economy hundreds of kilometers above our heads. The heavens are on sale. The pioneers are doing everything from building 3D-printed rockets, manufacturing drugs in space factories, designing space debris detection systems, creating 3D maps of the world, using space mirrors to reflect sunlight onto Earth…every niche space-related sci-fi idea is now on the table because of the changing economics of space travel. But why has it gotten so much cheaper? It comes down to two broad factors.

For one, the space supply chain is experiencing the same Moore’s Law makeover as the one enjoyed by your other consumer electronics.

Electrical and mechanical components are getting smaller and more advanced, meaning it is getting easier and cheaper to build things like rockets, satellites and spacecraft (FYI the plural of ‘spacecraft’ is also ‘spacecraft’ – not ideal, I know).

But beyond that, the vastly reduced per-kilogram cost of space launches is attributable to the entry of private companies into a domain that used to be the sole fiefdom of national governments and national space agencies.

Led by the pioneering work of private rocket companies like SpaceX, that facilitate cheaper transport to space

Whereas Old Space was dominated by the likes of NASA, ISRO, JAXA, ESA, Roscomos, and CNSA, today the global space ecosystem is more diverse, which brings us to…

Open Secret #2 – The New Space age is being defined not by national governments, but by nimble startups that are invading every habitable nook in the space supply chain.

And if we’re being totally honest, it has been catalysed largely by the efforts of a single company.

(If this is the only space essay you’re going to read, and you plan to sit through the entire thing, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t at least give you an introduction to the most important company in New Space).

Back in 2002, Elon Musk took $100 million of his total windfall from the sale of PayPal (which he co-founded) and used it to seed a new venture – SpaceX – whose goal was to provide accessible transport to space (i.e. cheap rocket launches).

Musk believed (and still believes) that humanity sits in a precarious position. We have all our civilisational eggs in an Earth-shaped basket, which means we face the risk of a species-level wipe-out in the event of a cataclysmic event (like a meteor crash, supervolcano explosion, nuclear war, robot uprising, caffeine shortage etc). On a long enough timescale (think millions of years), an extinction level event occurring on Earth is a statistical guarantee. Sorry to break it to you.

So, as something of an insurance policy for humanity, the stated goal of SpaceX is to help humans become a multi-planetary species (and specifically to start by setting up a colony on Mars). In order to get there, Elon posited that we first need to find a technically and economically feasible way to get enough people from Earth to Mars (roughly one million people, per Musk) so they can form a self-sustaining civilisation, and reboot human consciousness if anything were to happen to our original home. Hence, he started a rocket company.

Tim Urban from WaitButWhy illustrated this ‘formula’ in a blogpost from 2017 that still holds true.

The key to his multi-planetary end-state was to figure out how to vastly bring down the cost of getting people and things into space. Luckily, there was plenty of margin to work with on that front.

In 2002, Elon, then looking around at the status quo in the US aerospace industry, was disappointed. Americans had last landed a man on the moon in 1972, yet in the intervening years there were no other show-stopping, species-altering achievements to boast of. There were no bases on the moon. Humans hadn’t been to any other planets in the solar system. Most of NASA’s efforts revolved around sending unmanned probes (i.e. little robots) into space to learn more about the universe; or research projects like the Hubble and James Webb Telescopes; and routine experiments on the International Space Station (which is like a giant floating lab that resides in Earth’s orbit).

While undoubtedly important, these activities didn’t set the heart alight in the way that a monumental event like the moon landing had done. They were ‘safe’ plays. It seemed like the US, having beaten the USSR to the moon in a furious Space Race in the 1960s, was content to sit back and bask in the warmth of its victory for decades on end.

This watering down of NASA’s ambitions had been exacerbated by the fact that aerospace in the US had become an Old Boys Club. Bloated government contracts were perpetually reserved for legacy contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, who continued to fortify their positions by massaging the right muscles of the US political apparatus. These lumbering behemoths had no incentive to reduce their costs, increase their pace, or raise their game. It meant that space was an arena largely closed off to new competition, owing to the prohibitive cost of entry and engineering effort that would have scared off most sane people.

Pictured here: Not Most Sane People

These days the word ‘disrupt’ is often abused in the pitch decks of starry-eyed founders to buttress the most milquetoast of startup ideas. In this case, however, SpaceX didn’t just disrupt the market for rocket launches, it rewrote the rules for what’s possible in space.

Musk brought the Silicon Valley ethos of ‘move fast and break things’ into rocket building. He brought much of the core engineering in-house, eschewing the reliance on thousands of individual component manufacturers. This gave him far greater control over the design, the costs, and the speed of rocket production. In addition to modernising the hardware and software of rocket design, SpaceX also achieved the quasi-magical holy grail of landing its rockets back on Earth in one piece (instead of letting them blow up after every mission).

Team Anant was like Hogwarts for space nerds. And it wasn’t easy to get into. Awais was put through a four-month assessment process. He had to first pass a basic aptitude test, from which 20 students were selected for the next stage. Then, these candidates were taught the basics of satellite engineering for four months. “We learned how each of the sub-systems worked, how the tech came together, what the supply chain looked like etc,” recalled Awais. “At the end of four months you’d have to pass a final test. It was a test of your ability, yes, but the lengthy process also filtered for people with both patience and determination.”

The eventual goal of Team Anant was to make a working satellite that ISRO would then launch into orbit on one of their rockets. For someone with an interest in space, it didn’t get much better than that. That experience, which made up a big chunk of his college tenure, gave Awais firsthand insight into “the difficulty of making hardware that could survive the harshness of space”. The team also explored and experimented with cutting-edge satellite applications. One of these research projects involved the use of hyperspectral imaging for Earth observation. It was an emerging field that was beginning to draw the attention of the global space community in the 2010s for its potential to reveal hidden aspects of terrestrial phenomena…

As it turned out, Team Anant was the first ‘sliding doors’ moment of Awais’ college life. The next one, was being assigned the same hostel as Kshitij for their second year at BITS. The most important one, however, would come later that year. In early 2017 he walked into the dormroom of one his friends and glanced upon a word scribbled on a whiteboard that would change the course of his life.

Hyperloop

In July 2012, Elon Musk (yeah, same guy) announced at a media event that he was mulling over the concept for ‘a fifth mode of transport’. At its core, the idea involved propelling capsule-like pods through near-vacuum tubes at incredibly high speeds. He suggestedr that this invention could represent a new addition to humanity’s roster of transport options that so far included cars, trains, ships, and planes.

Musk dubbed this concept the Hyperloop.

A year after his initial announcement he published a concept-paper for the Hyperloop that fleshed out the logic and design-principles behind his idea. At the time, Musk was lamenting how modern infrastructure projects like the newly proposed California High-Speed-Rail project were somehow slower, more expensive, and less safe than existing bullet-train projects around the world. He was disappointed by the lack of ambition and innovation demonstrated by civic officials. In his view, it was only worth investing in a new transport system if, compared to existing options, it was:

– Safer
– Faster
– Lower cost
– More convenient
– Immune to weather
– Sustainably self-powering
– Resistant to Earthquakes
– Not disruptive to those along the route

Enter the Hyperloop.

Inspired by ideas that were in some cases centuries old, the Hyperloop was touted as the ideal solution for high-speed transport between large cities that were less than 1500 km apart. Essentially, humans and cargo would travel through steel tubes in sleek pods that were either magnetically levitated or propelled over a cushion of air. Musk originally envisioned the latter, where the Hyperloop would function on the same principles as an air-hockey table, but instead of the air coming up from the table, it would be pushing downward from the puck (i.e. from the pod).

Musk personally described the Hyperloop as a “cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table”. Because of the minimal friction and reduced air resistance, pods could theoretically zip through the tube at close to the speed of sound. If it worked, the Hyperloop would dramatically reduce the commute times between well-trodden traffic corridors (like the one between Los Angeles and San Francisco).

“You couldn’t pay me to get in that.” – my girlfriend (Source)

As you may have gathered, Elon Musk is a busy man. In 2015, he had his hands full with both SpaceX and Tesla. There was no room for another complex, high-stakes commercial venture in his life. He had no intention of getting into the Hyperloop business himself. Instead, his objective in publishing the paper was to inspire other entrepreneurs, scientists, public officials and enthusiasts to solve his traffic woes for him.

He hoped that by forgoing any patents on the Hyperloop idea and releasing it into the public domain (kind of like Linux), other people would take the concept and run with it. And they did. Companies like Hyperloop One (Virgin Hyperloop), Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, and several others were incorporated soon after to bring the Hyperloop vision to reality all around the world. While Musk didn’t participate in the festivities himself, he did organise one very specific party as part of the celebrations.

In the road running parallel to their headquarters in Hawthorne, California, SpaceX built a one-mile-long vacuum tube to function as a Hyperloop test track. In 2016, they invited independent engineering teams and student teams from around the world to participate in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition to see who could build the best working prototype of a Hyperloop pod. Here’s the ad that kicked it all off:

For the rare breed of tinkerers who relish the challenge of tackling seemingly impossible engineering problems, the Hyperloop competition was an irresistible draw.

In the summer of 2017, a group of bright Indian college students succumbed to its siren song.

Hyperloop(Team India)

“I had made a plan to hang out with my friend Ganesh from the Quizzing Club sometime in the second semester of our second year. I walked into his room, and on the board there were these scribbles about the Hyperloop. They had been written by his roommate, Sibesh Kar, who was in the batch above us at BITS.”

Awais was immediately intrigued. Like many other tech enthusiasts immersed in popular tech culture (in which Elon Musk often featured as a key protagonist), he had heard of the Hyperloop challenge. He got to chatting with Sibesh, who he describes as “an overachiever that stood out even amongst an entire university of overachievers” (and someone who would later go on to helm one of the most exciting AI startups in India – Maya Labs).

Sibesh had been plotting to enter the Hyperloop competition. It didn’t take long for Awais to throw his hat in the ring, volunteering to be the second member of the embryonic BITS Hyperloop team. “The novelty of the challenge is what made it interesting,” he recalls. “It’s one thing to build a small satellite as part of student team, guided by ISRO scientists following pre-established best practices and design parameters. The Hyperloop was a different beast. It required creativity and engineering from first principles, which made it exciting. We didn’t have any grand plan. We thought we’d give it a shot, and, best case, maybe we would get a chance to meet Elon.”

His first order of business – as the junior member of the team – was to put up posters across the college inviting other students to apply to join their efforts. Much like it was for Sibesh and Awais, Hyperloop proved to be an irresistible clarion call for their peers too. The team grew from 8 to 10 to ~30 undergraduate students. The movement spread from Pilani to the Goa and Hyderabad campuses of BITS. It eventually included students from other elite engineering institutions in India. It also included Awais’ by-now close friend and hostel-mate Kshitij, who remembers his application process fondly:

“I had asked Awais if I could join the team and he suggested I talk to Sibesh. I was okay at handling ‘Controls’ systems so that’s where I thought I could contribute on the pod. Sibesh started asking about what I was passionate about. I had no idea what I was passionate about so I just made up an answer and said ‘planes’! But then he asked me which plane models I liked and I had nothing to tell him. I had only flown twice in my life – once when I was 11 in a Kingfisher plane and the other when I came to Pilani. It was really embarrassing. I started looking into planes as soon as I was done with the interview, to the point where now I’ve fallen in love with aviation.”

Their brief was simple – design a pod that could handle going at >500km/h speeds, magnetically levitating inside a vacuum tube, with the ability to brake from that insane speed down to zero almost instantly. The approach of the BITS Hyperloop team (later christened ‘Hyperloop India’) was straightforward. With no template or textbook to pull from, they borrowed ideas from wherever they could, and made up the rest.

The BITS Hyperloop team employed the trusty Matt-Damon-in-The-Martian approach to engineering

To their surprise, their designs made it through the initial screening by SpaceX. And then the next screening. And then the final assessment. In early 2017, they were selected as one of 24 finalists out of ~2500 global teams that had applied (the only one from India, and one of two from Asia). They had won the right to build and present their pod to Elon Musk and the SpaceX team. If they were selected as one of the three best teams, they would even get to race their pod in the vacuum tunnel at SpaceX HQ. The challenge now was to figure out how to build it. Awais recalled that:

“There was no prize money involved. SpaceX wasn’t assisting teams with a production budget. The university wouldn’t sponsor our efforts either. We had to figure out how to raise money on our own and figure out how to build it on our own. It became clear that we needed to get out of the desert. ”

In the summer of 2017, a ragtag group of 30-odd students descended onto Bangalore – the tech capital of India – to bring their Hyperloop dreams to fruition. They set up shop in a co-working space called Workbench Projects under Halasuru Metro Station (financing this from their savings and money earned from summer internships). The actual construction of the pod would happen an hour away from the city in the industrial hub of Peenya.

From May to July, most of the team juggled their work on the pod along with their summer internship commitments. Awais, as one of the three engineering leads of the team (in charge of the levitation and braking module), would spend his mornings interning at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (“working on helicopter engineering and other things”). Then, he would use his afternoons in the city sourcing sponsors for their efforts, before commuting to Peenya for the rest of the evening and night to work on the nuts and bolts of the pod.

The design and the production for the ‘OrcaPod’

The team was able to garner support from their neighbours in Peenya. “We tried to tempt potential sponsors by telling them that Elon Musk would see their logo on our pod. Most said no to directly giving us money,” recalled Awais, “but several companies in the industrial park agreed to do our machining or wiring for free in exchange for a logo feature.”

Ultimately the team was able to secure a significant chunk of their funding requirements from Hyperloop One (the entity hoping to build an independent company on the back of Musk’s original blueprint). Hyperloop One had earmarked a Mumbai-Bangalore-Chennai corridor as one of the first viable global Hyperloop routes, so they were happy to support a team that was generating awareness and interest in the Hyperloop from the Subcontinent.

People from Chennai in 2030 realising it takes less time to get from Chennai to Bangalore than it does to get from Bangalore to Bangalore

Over the course of three months, the pod gradually took shape. Kshitij remembered how “Day to day it didn’t feel like anything was happening, but in August suddenly you look around and this thing has come together. It was a magical experience. We were packed together working, sleeping, eating, and basically living out of this little maker-space under the metro station. You had all these young kids from different campuses and backgrounds putting their brains together on a completely unfamiliar problem to meet an extremely tight deadline. It felt like the purest form of engineering.”

In August 2017, they were finally ready to make the pilgrimage to the House of Musk.

Hyperloop: Prime Time

By the time they flew to California, what had started as a throwaway effort in a dormroom at BITS Pilani had blossomed into a campaign worthy of national attention and pride.

Because of funding and visa restrictions, the entire team of ~30-45 students weren’t able to make the trip. Travel was restricted to engineering leads and members directly responsible for assembling and fixing the pod. With summer holidays having ended, the travelling party had special permission to miss the first three weeks of the semester.

Two weeks before demo day, the team began shipping out individual sections of the OrcaPod to safeguard against any last-minute hitches. They were (mostly) successful in this regard. Per Awais –

“The components for the levitation module included these powerful magnets we had to source from China. The airline we used misplaced the travel documents, which meant the magnets had reached the US but the papers were stuck in Hong Kong. US Customs wouldn’t clear these because they were technically classified as hazardous materials. I was tasked with resolving the situation. The US customs officials were flabbergasted at this lanky kid in their office making all this ruckus about magnets. Eventually we managed to sort it out.”

They turned a workshop 15 minutes away from SpaceX’s HQ in Los Angeles into their temporary home. The team of ~15 students worked around the clock to assemble their vehicle ahead of race day. Bleary eyed and physically spent (“we looked like vagabonds”), they managed to get the pod in working condition to present to SpaceX executives on the day of the event.

Scene from the livestream of the SpaceX Hyperloop pod competition (this may or may not be a screenshot from Star Wars: Episode I)

Awais described it as a carnival for engineers. Some of the brightest independent and student teams from around the world had mobilised in one place to answer Musk’s challenge. What separated Hyperloop India from their competition, is that their design rationale had been based on building something that was commercially viable and physically implementable. They wanted to build a demo of a pod that could be scaled up to actually ferry humans and cargo in a future Hyperloop tube, instead of just a sleek bullet that would look good in a trial run but could never work in reality.

Their ‘OrcaPod’ was one of the only vehicles that was based on a realistic business case.

Awais with the OrcaPod at SpaceX’s HQ

While they weren’t ultimately selected as one of the best three teams in the competition, their designs were praised by Musk and other executives. Awais proudly remembers how Elon had commented on the finesse of their avionics (computing and electronics) system – “He said ours was nicely organised vs others which had their wires all over the place.”

The highlight of the trip, aside from ice cream at the SpaceX cafeteria, and a cheeky selfie with Elon, was a tour of the SpaceX factory. For Awais, this was akin to a religious experience.

“As international students, we were technically not allowed to tour the facility because of security restrictions, but SpaceX let us through along with the other American college students. The cherry on top was being able to see and touch the Falcon 9 booster, which was the first rocket SpaceX had managed to land back on Earth. It was an electric experience. It gave me a surge of motivation. Those kinds of things stay with you forever, becoming part of your dreams and your identity.”

In many ways, this was where his future startup was conceived. Seeing rocket engines and reusable boosters up close transformed his childhood bedroom dreams into an all-too-real adult reality. For the first time, he was in direct contact with something that had been to orbit and made it back. The experience shifted space from the realm of science fiction to science fact. It made it seem accessible and achievable, all at once. There was no going back.

From Pods to Pixxels

For both Awais and Kshitij, the Hyperloop was the defining experience of their college lives. It gifted them the kinds of professional epiphanies that can only be earned once learning is untethered from classrooms, grades and exams. Crucially, it exposed them to the realities of engineering. For Kshitij:

“It taught me that the ‘people’ aspect of engineering is as important as the technical stuff. If people are sufficiently motivated, they will go beyond their comfort zone to achieve a particular mission. But to generate that sufficient motivation, you need to give them challenging problems to solve. I also found that even in engineering teams, people’s emotions play a big role in their performance. It’s important to understand how people like to be seen, what they want the perception of their roles to be, why they’re approaching things in a certain way – these things matter.”

For Awais, it shattered the idea that you need a certain license or a certain level of experience to do something great. Curiosity and determination were ample qualification in most cases.

“I realised that engineering is both easier and harder than it is made out to be. On one hand, it doesn’t matter how complex an engineering system seems – if you start with your requirements, and let physics be your guide, given the right timelines and the right effort, there’s nothing so complex that you can’t understand it. On the other hand, engineering is way harder than it seems in a textbook! Even if you’re following an established pathway, things rarely work as planned. Things break. Sometimes individual components work, but then you put them together and the system doesn’t work as intended. That’s why cutting-edge engineering is closer to magic than math.”

Awais also reflected on how the commercial, marketing, and sponsorship side of the equation had been as important to getting their efforts over the line as their technical breakthroughs (something they would keep in mind throughout their Pixxel journey too). For two self-professed introverts coming from humble backgrounds, the Hyperloop experience gave them the confidence that they could hold their own in teams filled with talented people. Awais admitted that it probably also gave them the “false confidence” to think they could tackle all manner of engineering problems, no matter how beastly.

like the kind of beastly problems found in this book (🤷‍♂️)

On returning from Los Angeles, he spent much of his third year at BITS returning to his home comfort of space. The adventure at SpaceX, coupled with the taste of space he had gotten with Team Anant, had convinced him that building for space represented a very real and immediate economic opportunity. It helped that the global space economy was undergoing its own renaissance at the time. Many of the inflection points we discussed at the start of this piece were beginning to make themselves apparent. Among others:

• By 2016, SpaceX had successfully demonstrated reusable rocket technology, dramatically reducing launch costs and sparking a new commercial Space Race. Blue Origin, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, was hot on its heels with similarly grand ambitions.
• The small satellite revolution was in full swing, with companies like Planet Labs and Maxar deploying constellations of miniaturised Earth-observation satellites. The former had pioneered the ‘CubeSat’ standard of tiny shoebox-sized satellites that could be cheaply produced, launched and replaced, compared with the antiquated bus-sized billion-dollar satellites that were designed to be heavy-duty and long-lasting. Satellite internet ventures like OneWeb and SpaceX’s Starlink were also gearing up to provide global Internet coverage from space.
• NASA was pushing forward with its plans to return to the Moon through the Artemis program, while also setting its sights on Mars.
• On the home front, ISRO was making significant strides, setting a then-world record by launching 104 satellites on a single rocket in February 2017. The agency successfully launched its most powerful rocket, the GSLV Mk III, in June 2017, and also announced ambitious plans for lunar exploration with Chandrayaan-2 and human spaceflight with the Gaganyaan program.

While there wasn’t really a private space sector in India back in the early 2010s, a group of dreamers calling themselves Team Indus had captured the national imagination by attempting to become the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, as part of the Google Lunar X-Prize competition. They were ultimately unsuccessful but left a legacy that has inspired basically every space entrepreneur in India today.

For the first time in decades there were several viable routes into space for those bold enough to take the voyage. If you were paying attention, you would have noticed that a window into the cosmos had been left ajar.

A High Frontier

As a space enthusiast, Awais began with a blank canvas:

“It would have been cool to work at NASA, but it was out of the question. There were security restrictions that made it virtually impossible for foreign nationals to get a job there. ISRO was an option, but in my head it would have taken a long time for an entry level engineer to be in a position to make a meaningful contribution. So I started exploring potential space-based business ideas.”

Looking around at what was happening in the commercial space arena, coupled with ideas of space colonisation and ‘generation ships’ that had been embedded in his psyche on the back of countless hours reading sci-fi as a kid, Awais kept coming back to the idea of humanity as a multi-planetary species.

He reasoned that:

“Given what was happening on the rocket front, it seemed inevitable that humans would eventually be a multi-planetary species. To me, logically, if humanity was really going to live amongst the cosmos, we would need to build habitable biomes and factories in space itself, not just bases on the Moon and Mars like Elon and Jeff Bezos were planning. Going one step further, if you want to build things in space, you need materials in space. Think about how expensive, inefficient and pollutive it would be to have to keep mining Earth for materials and then transporting them to space. So that means we would need to find a way to natively source materials in space. The more I thought about it and the more I read, the more it seemed like asteroid mining was the idea to bet on.”

Asteroid mining, once a staple of science fiction, entered serious scientific discourse in the late 20th century as our understanding of asteroid composition and space technology advanced. The concept gained momentum in the 2010s with the formation of companies like Planetary Resources (2010) and Deep Space Industries (2013), both of which aimed to extract valuable resources from near-Earth asteroids.

The rationale is compelling: asteroids potentially contain trillions of dollars worth of precious metals, rare earth elements, and water (crucial for space-based fuel and life support). Requirements for asteroid mining include advanced spacecraft for prospecting and extraction, in-situ resource utilisation technology, and significant upfront capital.

While no asteroid has been mined yet, there have been notable milestones: Japan’s Hayabusa missions successfully returned samples from asteroids (in 2010 and 2020), and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission collected samples from asteroid Bennu in 2020. Despite the initial excitement, both Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries were acquired or pivoted by 2018, highlighting the significant challenges of turning asteroid mining into a viable business.

Bruce Willis remains the only human to do any kind of serious mining work on an asteroid (and the only one to do it without any venture capital)

Working backwards from that thesis, Awais began to catalogue the various steps humanity would need to take to get to that future, and shortlist the areas that might make for good entrepreneurial pursuits in the present. Constrained by the budget of a college student, things like rocket production or space manufacturing seemed immediately out of reach. But there was once specific piece of the asteroid mining value chain that he had had firsthand experience with, courtesy of his tenure with the student satellite team at BITS.

Critical to the success of asteroid mining is the ability to accurately determine an asteroid’s composition from afar, which requires sophisticated remote sensing technologies (remote sensing includes anything that allows you to gather data about something from afar). One of the technologies that was entering the popular discourse in space and satellite communities in the mid-2010s was something called hyperspectral imaging. It involved the use of specialised cameras to analyse the chemical and mineral composition of asteroids in unprecedented detail without the need for costly sample-return missions, potentially revolutionising how we prospect for resources beyond Earth.

Awais had already brushed up against hyperspectral imaging during his time with Team Anant. It was one of the experiments that the group was conducting research for, not to mine asteroids but to explore the applications of the technology to solve problems on Earth, which brings us to…

…or to be more specific:

The (Hyperspectral) Explanation Station

If your eyes have glazed over every time you’ve read the word ‘hyperspectral’ because you don’t know what the hell it means, don’t worry. We’re going to spend the next section unglazing them.

Let’s start from the basics and build up.

Every material in the universe interacts with light in its own unique way. When light hits an object, it can either be absorbed, reflected, or transmitted. The specific combination of these interactions creates something of a ‘spectral fingerprint’. It’s like each material has a unique relationship with light, and can be identified based on the specific way it absorbs, reflects or transmits light.

Kind of like how you know exactly who was sitting on the couch based on the nature and smell of the dent they left there (i.e. their posterior fingerprint)

Let’s park this piece of information for now.

When it comes to light, we talk about ‘spectral’ signatures because light is really made up of an entire spectrum of colours.

First discovered by Dr. P. Floyd in 1973, who was impressively also the first scientist to study the dark side of the moon

Grown ups call this the ‘electromagnetic’ spectrum (because it comprises a full spectrum of electromagnetic waves that travel at different wavelengths). This spectrum of light stretches far beyond what our eyes can perceive, from long radio waves to short gamma rays. Our eyes are tuned to detect only a narrow slice of this spectrum – we call this the visible light range.

Source

The visible light range is really made up of only three wavelengths (or bands) in the electromagnetic spectrum – red, green, and blue. It means the entirety of human sight is playing out within these three bands. It’s like having a basic three-crayon set to colour in our view of reality (your brain creates all the other colours you see because it’s great at combining these three signals in different ways). This red-green-blue limitation is due to how the machinery of our eyes evolved over time (take it up with God).

But the full electromagnetic spectrum (i.e. range of light) is vastly more complex and information-rich. There is a lot more happening beyond the narrow red-green-blue range that we perceive. For instance, infrared light, just beyond the red we can see, carries heat information (think of the technology used in night vision goggles you see in the movies). Ultraviolet light, just past violet, is what gives us sunburns. X-rays pass through soft tissue to reveal our bones. And so on.

As we established up top, all material in the universe interacts with light in a unique way – i.e. everything reflects, absorbs or transmits light in a uniquely identifiable way based on its molecular structure and composition. But this interaction is happening across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, not just within the visible range.

For instance, in the infrared range, materials emit or absorb light based on their temperature and chemical properties. Or in the ultraviolet range, certain molecules may fluoresce (i.e. glow or emit light), absorbing high-energy UV light and re-emitting it at lower energies. Our perception of the world would be a lot different if we could ‘see’ what was happening in the spectral bands outside of our visible range.

For starters, the number of pears we eat would drastically reduce

By the start of the 20th century, humans had gotten pretty good at measuring the behaviour of light (using devices called spectrographs and spectroscopes). Going a step further, we were able to reliably measure and graphically depict how light interacts with different materials. This allowed us to categorise various substances in the universe – including minerals, chemicals, elements, and other objects – based on the unique electromagnetic patterns generated from their interactions with light. These unique patterns act as a kind of ‘spectral signature’.

Spectral signatures based on the reflectiveness of different surfaces (Source)

In the 1980s, we dialled this technology up another notch. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) began to experiment with building imaging systems based on spectroscopic technology. Think of it like this:

Regular cameras, much like our eyes, capture images in just three spectral bands – red, green, and blue. But these new imaging systems could capture data across hundreds of wavelengths for each pixel in an image. This meant that for every point in an image, scientists could obtain a detailed spectral signature, providing a wealth of information about the material properties of whatever was being imaged. It’s like giving each pixel its own miniature spectrometer, allowing us to ‘see’ far beyond what our eyes or traditional cameras could reveal.

Compared with regular cameras that capture images in just three wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, these new ‘hyperspectral’ cameras could capture data across hundreds of wavelengths and depict these photographically.

The word ‘hyperspectral’ is mostly a made up term intended to differentiate between multispectral imagery (which captures data across a modest 10-20 bands) vs imagery that captures data across hundreds of narrow, adjacent spectral bands, providing far more spectral detail

In practice, NASA’s early experiments with hyperspectral imagery revolutionised our understanding of the cosmos. They allowed NASA and other space agencies to analyse the composition of faraway galaxies, nebulae, and planets based on their spectral signatures (brought to life via gorgeous photographs). By capturing light across hundreds of wavelengths, astronomers could detect the presence of specific elements and compounds in celestial bodies millions of light-years away.

The images you periodically see from the Hubble or James Webb Telescopes aren’t really what the universe ‘looks’ like. They’re reflections of the complex interactions between matter and energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, visualised in ways our human eyes could never perceive. These images are scientific data transformed into visual art, revealing the hidden beauty and complexity of the cosmos in wavelengths far beyond our natural sight.

One striking example is NASA’s imaging of the famous “Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula. When viewed in different wavelengths, like infrared (in this image), these cosmic structures reveal details invisible to the naked eye or traditional telescopes.

Hyperspectral imaging is good for more than just space-based eye candy, however. Back on Earth, even in the 1980s, the potential for hyperspectral imaging was apparent. Compared with regular cameras, hyperspectral cameras are storytellers extraordinaire, spilling the beans about the minutiae of photographed objects and scenes in a way that RGB cameras could only dream of.

In the 1980s, NASA’s JPL was first to pioneer airborne hyperspectral sensors like AVIRIS, primarily for geological surveys (NASA basically stuck a hyperspectral camera onto an aircraft). Using AVIRIS, researchers discovered previously unknown mineral deposits in Death Valley, mapped hidden fault lines in California, and even detected trace amounts of gold in Nevada’s rock formations from the air. You might think then, that after such an apparently useful technological concept was proven, hyperspectral imagery (coined as a term by Alexander Goetz in 1985) would become commonplace in the years and decades since. But it didn’t quite play out that way.

Despite its potential, hyperspectral imaging remained primarily confined to government agencies, space programs, and specialised research institutions. This was due to the high costs of collecting this data (either via drones, airplanes, or from space via heavy-duty nationally-commissioned satellites), as well as the technical complexity (and costs) of designing and building specialised sensors and cameras. This limited accessibility, coupled with the challenges of processing and analysing giant swathes of hyperspectral data, meant that the capabilities of this technology were slow to be harnessed by the broader commercial and scientific communities. But things changed in the 2010s.

Depending on what type of satellite you choose, your cost of production in the 2020s would beat least 333X-3500X cheaper
than it would have been just a decade ago.

Propelled by the dramatic lowering in the costs of electronics and the costs of space travel, satellite-based hyperspectral imagery was suddenly in vogue again by the mid-2010s. It had begun to invade the chatter in commercial space communities. Understandably, it also represented the kind of ideal rabbit-hole that a young space enthusiast would want to dive into – i.e. warm, relatively unexplored, with the strong possibility of containing buried treasure…

Start Up Space Up

“It took many months to settle on asteroid mining as the single opportunity to pursue. But the timing needed to be right. The market already contained the ruins of early pioneers that had tried to be too ambitious, too early. Planetary Resources had had to shut down. Deep Space Industries had pivoted to doing thrusters.

I took inspiration from Elon’s SpaceX philosophy, to similarly start our journey with a relatively simple first step and build up to the eventual long-term goal. Hyperspectral satellites seemed like the ideal fit. We would start by proving our hyperspectral imaging capabilities on Earth, then apply the same proprietary technology to map the solar system, and subsequently use it to understand the composition of asteroids and planets to aid humanity’s interplanetary future. If we got things right, we would generate enough revenue from a hyperspectral data business to finance more adventurous space exploration activities later on. Picking a sensible starting point was key to going the distance.”

Awais spent most of his third year at BITS narrowing down on his thesis, fleshing out each step of his plan on a whiteboard in his dormroom. By the end of the school year, in early 2018, over one of their countless games of FIFA, he shared his asteroid mining idea with his close friend Kshitij.

Maybe in a group of other 17 year-olds in another dormroom in another college, the question that would confront an idea like that would be ‘what are you smoking?’. In this one, however, the question was ‘what would it take?’.

Awais and Kshitij spent weeks and months sketching out the contours of what a hypothetical hyperspectral satellite constellation would look like – what materials they would need, how expensive would it be, how complicated would the camera need to be, what were realistic timelines, how many satellites would make up their constellation etc. They were joined soon after by Manas Gupta and Tejaswi Hareesh, two friends and batchmates (who would become the founding engineers and future pillars of strength at Pixxel).

In what would become a recurring theme at Pixxel, the hyperspectral thesis would be validated and re-validated at several junctures in their journey. Awais had first brushed up against the technology as part of the student satellite group with Team Anant. The second time he encountered it was during his research around the requirements for a future asteroid mining venture. The third instance, however, is what sealed the deal as far as the business case for hyperspectral imaging was concerned.

Even as the four college students wrestled with the complexities of launching their own satellite constellation, they also simultaneously had their eyes on another prize – an XPRIZE, to be specific. Still buzzing from the thrill of the Hyperloop challenge, the quartet had decided to enter another futuristic global competition. This was the recently announced IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, a $5 million global competition that challenged teams to apply Artificial Intelligence to solve ‘a grand challenge with a novel outcome’. The team theorised that they could use the potential winnings as seed money for a later satellite venture.

Not to be confused with Professor X’s XPRIZE, awarded for the best use of mutant powers to solve problems at the X-Mansion (awarded to Wolverine in back-to-back years for extraordinary claw-based lawn-mowing capabilities)

The XPRIZE competition was intended to play out over four years, giving participants the freedom to select their own ‘grand challenge’. Awais, Kshitij, and the team decided to focus on tackling world hunger and food security, in part because of the outsized contribution of the agricultural sector to India’s economy. They planned to turn to space to tackle the problem.

“Our approach was to develop sophisticated AI and ML models based on satellite imagery,” Kshitij explained, “We analysed a lot of different public and open-source satellite data and realised that hyperspectral data provided a unique advantage when it came to modelling for things like crop yield estimation, tracking irrigation levels, identifying pest infestations, measuring soil health and chlorophyll content etc. The advantage was that it let you solve problems that were effectively invisible to other forms of imaging. Regular optical imagery just didn’t give us the detail we wanted. So we started looking around for good sources of hyperspectral data”

What they found was that aside from a few experimental hyperspectral datasets from the likes of LANDSAT and SENTINEL [major governmental satellite programmes from NASA and the European Space Agency], it was slim pickings. There was really nothing else out there. NASA had first pioneered satellite-based hyperspectral imaging on its EO1 satellite but this had been decommissioned by 2017. ISRO had also tested hyperspectral technology on a couple of missions, but none of the data was useful enough to buttress a commercial use case.

In most cases, the publicly available hyperspectral data was old and obsolete. This was because of the prohibitive costs of repeatedly flying airplanes or drones (equipped with hyperspectral cameras) over large areas of land on a recurring basis. The satellite data wasn’t much help either. It was either of low spatial resolution (i.e. too far out), or it fell within the multispectral range, with spectral depth that wouldn’t move the needle for high-stakes use cases (like detecting pollutant run-off into a water body, or the beginnings of a gas leak in an oil pipeline, or biological stress detection on a piece of farmland etc). The data they found wasn’t good enough to identify the biggest problems, much less solve them.

Source

The XPRIZE hammered home the hunches that they had honed over several months. Not only was hyperspectral data incredibly valuable when it came to solving major problems on Earth, but there was also no way to acquire this data commercially. In 2018, there wasn’t a single company in the world geared up to provide regular access to genuinely hyper-spectral, high-resolution data via satellite on a planetary scale.

It left them with a final question to answer, on whether this gap in supply was due to an absence of demand, or to having genuinely stumbled into pristine market terrain that had yet to be inhabited. Here, they were emboldened by another savvy move that belied their modest commercial chops at the time. Per Awais:

“Still working through things in our dormroom, we began sending out cold emails and DMs on LinkedIn to anyone we thought could be a potential customer of hyperspectral data. This included companies from around the world that we knew were using satellite data in various capacities – agricultural producers, energy companies, mining companies, commodity traders – and especially companies that we knew had Remote Sensing teams based on their LinkedIn data. We reached out to close to 50 companies and over 90% of them responded.

We said ‘Hey we’re students at BITS. We’re building a hyperspectral satellite constellation. Would you be interested in accessing this data?’. We asked them what kind of data they were currently using, where they were getting it from, how much they were paying for it etc. We asked if hyperspectral data would be a game-changer or just ‘nice to have’. We asked them what level of quality and resolution would be useful (they said minimum 10m resolution, and 5m ideally). And finally we asked them if they would pay a premium for this data if we could get it for them. Across the board, the response was ‘yes’. That was the last validation we needed. We ultimately used those answers to design the specs of our camera, then used those camera parameters to design our satellite. Screenshots of those cold emails even helped convince our early investors that this hyperspectral thing was real, and that we were for real.”

The team had finally arrived at the same juncture frequented by scores of entrepreneurs before and after them. The product they envisioned as being ubiquitous in their vision of the future didn’t exist in the present. It left them with two options. Either they could revise their vision, or manifest it themselves.

“Aut Inveniam Viam Aut Faciam” (“I shall either find a way or make one”)

The team decided that the logical next step for them was to build and launch a single hyperspectral satellite. They determined that this activity could be completed, start to finish, over the course of their summer holidays. Kshitij summed up their thought process at the time:

“We had built a futuristic Hyperloop pod in three months, something that had no precedent or template or prevailing technical literature. How hard could it be to build a satellite, a machine that came with well-established design principles and models that we could replicate? We were (foolishly) very confident it could be done.”

In part, their confidence stemmed from the work of Planet Labs, a company that may be unfamiliar to most readers but one which has been arguably as revolutionary to the space economy as SpaceX. Planet Labs, founded in 2010, pioneered the use of large constellations of small, inexpensive satellites to image the Earth instead of massive big-budget satellites that had been the norm at the time. Their breakthrough came from leveraging rapid advancements in consumer electronics to build their signature “Dove” satellites, each about the size of a shoebox, which could be mass-produced and frequently launched to maintain a constantly refreshed orbital fleet.

A lot of the satellite images you see on the news these days comes from Planet’s ever-vigilant flock of Doves. Their omnipresence has resulted in them playing a key role in modern surveillance, most notably to help the world understand the on-ground reality of the war in Ukraine

Another factor that gave them confidence was Awais’ experience with Team Anant, which had also been working on a hyperspectral payload (NB: a payload is the primary instrument or equipment on a satellite that performs its main mission – such as a camera for Earth observation or a transponder for communications – it’s essentially the reason the satellite is launched into space.).

“The problem with Team Anant was that it wasn’t structured to move quickly,” said Awais. “It was a student team, so people would be rolling in and out as they graduated. People would be working and re-working on the same things. The team’s focus would reset every two years. There was no continuity, so it was hard to transfer the context of urgency to that kind of set up. Team Anant was an amazing forum for learning, but it wasn’t the right vehicle for what we were trying to do at that point.”

Their initial plan was to run back the Hyperloop playbook. They would work as lean team (of 8-10 students) over the summer, tinkering around-the-clock to put together a working satellite. It would be a student project, supported by corporate sponsors, just like Hyperloop India. They even rented out the same maker-space under Halasuru Metro Station as they did the previous summer. This time around, success was not as forthcoming. Per Awais:

“We tried going to the same companies in Peenya who had helped us out with machining and components for the Hyperloop pod. They didn’t have the same appetite to sponsor our efforts. They hadn’t exactly seen a return on their investment from the previous year so they definitely weren’t open to doing anything for free. Some of them were open to giving us discounted rates, but this wasn’t a whole lot.”

Their other bright idea for sponsorship didn’t find any takers either.

“We went to a bunch of smartphone companies and told them that we’d take their smartphones into orbit on our satellite, and take picture of the Earth with their cameras. We said the images would make for epic ‘money shots’ that they could use in their marketing material. They looked at us like we were crazy.”

If Samsung and OnePlus had the foresight of an average Instagram influencer, they’d be drowning in likes right now (my lawyer says I have to specify that this was created on Midjourney)

With options for external sponsorship having been extinguished, the team turned to Awais to keep their engines running.

“When I was in school, my dad used to give me a reward of Rs. 3,000 if I finished first in class, Rs. 2,000 if I finished second, and Rs. 1,000 if I finished third. He put all of this money into a fixed deposit account. On the eve of that summer, he called me and said that the fund was maturing. By then the account had ballooned Rs. 3-3.5 lakh totally including some other savings and gifts during various festivals. He suggested I should use the money to plan some travels for the holidays. I told him I had better use for it.”

Awais’ good grades had given the team a small but meaningful corpus of seed money to kickstart their work and pay for their personal expenses over the summer months. While the cost of actually building the satellite they had envisioned was closer to Rs. 3-3.5 crores, they could use the funds they had to create 3D-printed renderings of their satellite prototype. It gave the team a tangible output for their toils, and added a veneer of credibility to their discussions with potential sponsors. Along the way they were even able to even get guidance from ex-ISRO scientists, ex-Team Indus veterans, and aerospace engineers from Bangalore, again as a result of shooting out cold emails to anyone that could be beneficial to their cause.

Ultimately the money ran out. Even after borrowing a couple of lakhs more out of Awais’ father’s limited savings, it was clear that the student-led effort had run its course. At the end of the summer, not only did they not have a working satellite ready for launch, but they had also not managed to raise a single rupee of external sponsorship. They decided it was time to get serious.

A Space for Pixxel (in India)

After three months of modest success, the broader student-volunteer team went their separate ways in time for the start of their final year in college. For Awais, Kshitij, Manas and Teja, the journey was just beginning. On the recommendation of a friendly advisor, they decided to turn their garage band operation into a real company – Pixxel – with the aim of building and launching a constellation of commercial hyperspectral satellites.

One of the first pictures taken of the team at their maker-space at Halasuru in the summer of 2018 (Source)

For the next 12 months, Awais and Kshitij (as CEO and CTO) focused on raising funds for their new venture, while Manas and Teja (as founding engineers) got started on the first demo satellite (all while balancing the workload of their final semesters at BITS). One of the perks of spending time with Team Anant was the exposure to ISRO’s best practices, and more importantly, to ISRO’s supply chain partners. The team had been able to tap into this network to find suppliers for electronic components and other production essentials, who were gracious enough to offer them the same parsimonious rates as they offered to the well-respected Indian space agency. They contracted one of these partners, a defence and aerospace solution provider based in Chennai, to build the satellite for them per their specifications.

“Ideally we wanted to build it ourselves, to learn the process of constructing a satellite end to end”, says Manas (their VP of Electrical Systems). “The vendor wasn’t willing to just supply us with components for fear of IP theft, but they said they could build the entire thing for us if we wanted. So we contracted them to build the whole satellite bus [the body of the satellite]. Partly it helped de-risk the process of building our first spacecraft by getting it done from an experienced source. But we made it clear to them that we didn’t just want to just buy a satellite at the end of the process, we wanted to be fully involved in the interim – in the design, evaluation, testing etc, all of it.”

It was a handshake agreement made on the assumption that Pixxel would be able to raise the funds required for the job by early 2019. Their vendor also gave them a small workspace to use for the duration of the engagement.

Manas and Teja moved to Chennai to supervise the production of the satellite. The duo stayed at a tiny local guesthouse, subsisting on the trusty entrepreneurial diet of street food and ramen noodles.

Fun fact – In 2005, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi took instant noodles to space, spurring the development of “Space Ram,” a vacuum-packed version of instant ramen suitable for consumption in zero gravity. Now back to the story.

Aside from dropping into Chennai every few weeks, Awais and Kshitij spent a majority of their time flitting around the country to speak to potential investors. It wasn’t easy to raise funding for a space-tech venture in India in 2018. There was really no private space economy to speak of. Although India had a rich tradition of space technology going back to the 1960s, this work had been entirely orchestrated by ISRO, which was set up in 1969, built on the foundations of the earlier Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR), itself established by a visionary scientist named Vikram Sarabhai in 1962.

A 1972 Indian stamp commemorating Dr. Vikram Sarabhai

For 60 years, India’s national space agency racked up an impressive list of accomplishments, proving that India could punch far above its economic weight when it came to activities in space.

This list includes becoming one of only six countries (along with the United States, Russia, China, France, and Japan) to have full launch capabilities, meaning we can launch, operate, and recover satellites from space. Along the way we’ve also barged into several exclusive space-clubs, like becoming the seventh country to successfully launch a satellite into orbit and the 14th nation to send a human to space (Rakesh Sharma on a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in 1984). We’ve also become only the fourth country to touchdown on the moon, and only the fourth space agency to successfully reach Mars’ orbit (and the only one do it on the first try).

Left: Aryabhata (1975) was India’s first satellite, designed to conduct experiments in X-ray astronomy, aeronomics, and solar physics, marking the country’s entry into the space age.; Right: Rohini-1 (1980) was the first satellite to be placed in orbit by an Indian-made launch vehicle (SLV-3), demonstrating India’s capability to both build and launch satellites independently.

What makes the Indian space programme special, is that it was set up at a time when the country was only few years removed from Independence. It meant that the champions of India’s space efforts (including then-PM Jawaharlal Nehru and future-President APJ Abdul Kalam) had to constantly justify why a poor country with much bigger, visible problems was frittering away precious resources away from Earth.

Those conditions led to a pervasive culture of resourcefulness, ingenuity and profligacy that still characterises ISRO’s activities today, punctuated famously by the fact that our Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) cost less than the budgets of The Martian and Gravity, two fictional stories about humans going to space.

For decades, ISRO remained the central, and often sole, actor in India’s space sector, a position cemented by the Satellite Communication Policy of 1997 and the revised Remote Sensing Data Policy of 2001. These policies, while promoting the use of space technology for national development, also restricted private sector participation, granting ISRO exclusive rights over critical space activities like satellite manufacturing and rocket launches. While ISRO’s own supply chain included hundreds of small businesses and large enterprises providing vital components and manufacturing, most of this participation was restricted to ‘backstage’ support.

For Indian space-tech entrepreneurs keen to conduct their own experiments and explorations in space, not only did they have to contend with significant technological and financial hurdles, but also significant regulatory challenges in carving out a place for themselves in India’s tightly controlled space ecosystem.

All this to say, that betting on a new satellite startup focused on cutting-edge technology that was helmed by a bunch of college students was the furthest thing from a no-brainer at the time. The venture capital ecosystem for spacetech in India had yet to take off in 2018. It meant countless meetings and “no thank you’s” for Awais and Kshitij (even though the novelty of their venture did at least get them through more doors than they anticipated). It meant they were often jerked around and strung along by VCs who extracted knowledge from them without any intention of investing.

Ultimately, they found their breakthrough amongst a familiar crowd, courtesy of the BITS Mafia.

A BIT(S) of Support

“I had heard through the grapevine about an event called BITS Sync that was taking place in Silicon Valley. It was essentially a forum for BITS alumni to network, to find mentors, to meet other investors, that type of thing. It also involved a pitch competition for startups,” recalled Awais.

The banner for this year’s event

The Pixxel team sent in their application. It was the only student application in the entire batch. They received an email four days before the event saying they had been accepted.

“We didn’t have any money to pay for flights,” says Awais. “I first asked the organiser of BITS Sync if they would sponsor our flights but he said they couldn’t help. So I reached out to one of the people we had cold emailed for our market research. It was an ex-BITS alumnus who was working as a VP for a mapping company in India. We had earlier asked if his company would invest in us but they had refused. This time we were in a desperate spot. It was two days till the event and we had no other options, so I built up the courage and called him and told him about our situation. I asked if he would directly sponsor our flights to San Francisco. He was kind enough to buy my ticket out of Delhi, and later also invested in the company in a personal capacity. He turned out to be less of an angel investor and more of an actual angel!”

This is what comes up when you ask an AI tool for an image of an ‘Indian angel investor’. Whatever, I’m just trying to keep things moving here.

Awais spent the next few days couch-surfing in San Francisco. Outside of BITS Sync he had set up a gauntlet of other meetings with other BITS founders and investors in Silicon Valley. “We got a number of commitments from these folks. Most of them were highly accomplished people, several were veterans in their industries, like Raju Reddy and Prem Jain. 25, 50, 100K wasn’t a lot for them to risk on a moonshot bet like Pixxel. I think they did it more from a philanthropic mindset than an investment one. Some of these were soft commitments incumbent on us getting an institutional investor on board. We welcomed all of it nonetheless. We had nothing to lose.”

Outside of BITS Sync, they also began tapping into the BITS alumni community in India. One of their first external cheques came from the BITS alumni investment syndicate.

Rahul Seth, a venture capitalist now running his own shop who was leading the syndicate at the time, recalls the Pixxel pitch deck standing out amongst a flood of other application that used to land in his inbox. “The world doesn’t lack people with competence, it lacks people with courage,” he says. “These guys had laid out a detailed plan to mine asteroids that involved building their own satellites and setting up a successful business around it, something no Indian company had done (and something no one has yet done even now). It was hard not admire the ambition, which they backed up with pure hustle, like convincing a stranger to pay for their ticket to San Francisco!”

Another notable example of this chutzpah is how Awais convinced the Sarda brothers, who manage a brass and real estate empire in Nagpur, to also come on board as investors. “I took a last minute flight from Chennai to Nagpur,” Awais recalled. “We had been previously introduced via a BITS connection. At that point we were going back and forth on the terms and we needed to get to a final decision quickly. So as a last throw of the dice, I proposed two sweeteners to the deal. One, I promised that if we ever got the chance to meet Elon Musk again, we would invite them along. And two, I offered them the right to name one of our satellites (which they said should be named after their mother). That’s what sealed it for them.”

Promise 2 has already been kept ✅

By the start of 2019, they had secured a few hundred thousand dollars in soft and hard commitments from various angel investors. Unfortunately, they had passed the deadline set by their Chennai vendor, who kicked them out of their office-space and paused production on their demo satellite till they could stump up the money they owed. It would take until May, the day before their final exams, to find an institutional investor that would finally make a bet on them.

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Sheetal Bahl, the Founding Partner at GrowX ventures, was one of the first VC’s in India to have a space-tech thesis way back in 2017. He explained his decision to invest in Pixxel in 2019. “It was the audacity of vision. To come in with a detailed 50-year plan as 20-year olds. In most cases you’d dismiss it as bluster, but they had done the work to back it up. They had evidence of clients that needed their product, and an entire list of people from aerospace and earth observation companies around the world that could be a good fit for their team. They continue to make bold proclamations even now but it’s always backed up with diligent work. Even then it was clear they had the right amount of confidence, and were both mature beyond their years.”

On the train ride back from Delhi to Pilani after their meeting with growX, as they geared up for their last examination at BITS, Awais remembers Kshitij turning to him and remarking on the absurdity of their situation. “Here we were supposed to be preparing for our exam as the most important milestone in our lives along with our batchmates. In reality we had already moved on to our next chapter.”

In July 2019, while still technically college students, Pixxel announced the close of their pre-seed round of ~$500K (eventually rising closer to ~$700K later on). It was led by growX Ventures, and included contributions from angel investors like Raju Reddy, Dileep Nath, and Pawan Sarda, among others.

“It wasn’t a lot of money for a space-tech company,” says Awais, “but it was more money than any of us had seen in our lives. And at least it meant that we could cover salaries and travel, and finance the cost of our first demo satellite.”

The Tech and the Stars

The team shifted base to Chennai immediately upon graduating. Their plan was to work alongside their vendor, helping to bring Pixxel’s first satellite to life. For their initial design, they took inspiration from a number of sources. “We looked the SwissCube, we looked at the 3U CubeSat that Planet Labs had used. We looked at some open-source blueprints, some university documents, some guidelines from NASA. It became an amalgamation of a few different design templates.”

Left: SwissCube nano-satellite; Right; 3U-CubeSat: Two of the many examples that influenced the designs of Pixxel’s first demo satellite

While deferring to their partner’s expertise on much of the engineering for the body of the satellite, their real focus was in designing the best hyperspectral camera anywhere in the world, which required creativity and first principles thinking. “For example, we were borrowing ideas from the application of hyperspectral imaging in biomedicine [used to identify the chemicals in pharmaceutical drugs], and seeing if we could make it work at a larger scale from space,” says Kshitij.

This first satellite was to be a demo satellite, short of the performance and resolution of the final product that had been desired by their market. It wasn’t meant to last long in space. They christened it ‘Anand’, naming it after one of their former interns who had tragically passed away. The demo was intended mainly to prove whether their hyperspectral imaging technology worked, and whether the data was genuinely useful to their initial cohort of interested customers. They set an aggressive target of launching the satellite at the end of 2019. Their goal was to follow this up soon after with the launch of their first full-fledged commercial satellite constellation (“We call them Fireflies”) right after.

Pixxel’s plan is to eventually have two classes of satellites – a lighter weight (50 kg) class of satellites called Fireflies, and a more advanced 200 kg class of satellites called Honeybees (neither will look like the AI-generated versions in the tweet above). But we’re skipping ahead ahead. Back in 2019…

While Manas and Teja supervised the production activity in Chennai, much like the previous year, the Pixxel journey once again took the company’s founders on a pitstop through California, to the Techstars Space Accelerator in Los Angeles. This stint was to be a bit longer, and, like much of their story, was the result of serendipity colliding with persistence.

“We were exploring the idea of applying to different startup accelerator and grant programmes,” says Kshitij. “We thought maybe it would give us access to mentors, industry connections, more capital etc, and allow us to build the company initially in a safe environment, almost like a cocoon. We looked at programmes with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Y-Combinator, Techstars, and a few others.”

They initially applied to a deep-tech incubator at a prominent research institute in India. Despite making it to the interview stage, the experience was far from what they had bargained for. “The organisers had got in this well-respected ex-ISRO scientist to interview us,” recalled Kshitij. “He basically ripped apart our ideas. He said our satellite would never work. He said our business case was flawed. He said our designs were not just infeasible but impossible. Every time we argued he countered by saying he had more experience building satellites than the number of years the two of us had lived on Earth, combined. We were steaming.”

Jiro, from Jiro Dreams of Sushi, has also incidentally been making sushi for longer than Awais and Kshitij have existed on Earth, combined. That piece of information is not relevant to this story, but we like non-sequiturs (and sushi) here at Tigerfeathers

The institute was still gracious enough to give them some grant money, but the team decided to pull up their stakes and go somewhere else. Aside from depositing a planet-sized chip on their shoulders, the experience left a bad taste in their mouths. Disillusioned by their brief incubator experience, they abandoned the rest of their applications mid-way and decided to continue with the original plan.

As fate would have it, the Managing Director of the (inaugural cohort of the) Techstars Space Accelerator, Matt Kozlov, noticed their unfinished application and reached out to them. “He said ‘if you guys are still keen to apply I can extend the deadline by a week’, remembers Awais. “Techstars was offering us the chance to be mentored by some of the biggest names in aerospace, so we were tempted to give it a shot. I was in Goa on a short holiday with friends at that time. I recorded a quick video application and sent it to Matt. The week after we got an email saying we got in.”

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Pixxel was one of 10 startups (and the only one from Asia) that had gotten selected. Awais and Kshitij spent July to September of 2019 in L.A. Both founders described this period as being both professionally and personally transformative.

“We were rubbing shoulders with literally the best and brightest people in the space industry. We got to learn from folks from NASA, Lockheed Martin, Maxar, the US Air Force…everyone that we thought could be our biggest partners or customers was there. There was no other way we could have ever gotten in a room with everyone that was relevant to our work in the same place.” said Awais.

It was an intense three months of pitching their startup to industry veterans, getting feedback directly from potential customers, and making connections with global aerospace and defence operators. “We pitched A LOT,” admitted Kshitij. “The cultural difference was so stark. Techstars was the first time anyone took us seriously. It was the first time ‘serious’ people took us seriously! Instead of mocking our ideas, people wanted to understand our thinking and learn what we were doing differently. We came out of it with a significantly better understanding of what our business should be.”

“It also validated our thesis,” said Awais. “We realised that our timing had been perfect. There were some technological breakthroughs taking place at that time with regards to the application of Gallium Nitride (GaN) as a semiconductor. It created several new possibilities for the use of electronics in space – like more efficient batteries, quicker communication systems (that could facilitate large hyperspectral data transfer), radiation-resistant materials, miniaturised components and sensors etc. This was all happening in 2017, 2018. Suddenly this window had opened up. If we had started Pixxel in 2015/2016 we would have been too early and it wouldn’t have worked. If we had started in 2020 we would have been too late.”

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On the softer side both Awais and Kshitij told me about how the experience in Los Angeles helped them mature as founders and people. “I felt like Kshitij really came into his own at Techstars,” Awais said with pride. “I had gotten the BITS Sync experience the year before, but this was really the first time Kshitij was in that kind of environment. We were doing hundreds of pitches, handling endless difficult questions. I saw Kshitij open up and become more confident in himself, even though the ability had been there all along.” Awais was already a polished speaker and presenter, but Kshitij joked that “If you think Awais talks fast now, you should have seen him then!” The two friends admitted that Techstars had been very stressful at times, but they came out of it having culled any fear of presenting themselves or their story to esteemed strangers.

Aside from the sage advice they received from industry veterans (“Mainly 1. Make sure you have customers and 2. Don’t run out money,” recalls Awais), another major perk of Techstars was the network it exposed them to. In particular, it introduced the team to two individuals who would become vital to their success.

Through a third-degree connection, they were introduced to Ryan Johnson, Vice President at Planet Labs, and one of the few founders in spacetech who had achieved a successful exit when he sold his satellite imaging company to Planet Labs a few years prior. “He gave us a crash course on the commercialisation of satellite imagery,” said Kshitij. “He taught us how to construct a contract, how to design our satellites to cover a maximum of customer use cases, how we should think about packaging our data etc”. Ryan would later join the company as an investor and member of the Board.

The other individual they met was Eiji Yafuso. “Eiji is a Jedi Master of hyperspectral technology.” recalled Kshitij. “He was one of the world’s foremost experts on building hyperspectral cameras (he literally has a PhD in Optical Sciences). He had designed and built cameras for drones, for airplanes, for satellites, for telescopes. He had learned from some of the global leaders in spectroscopy. Eiji had heard about us through the L.A. grapevine, and reached out to us on his own. The crazy part was that he was impressed with our approach, but also admitted it was risky and non-traditional. He helped us refine the design to be more pragmatic. He became one of our earliest believers – a true friend and confidant. He never looked at our age or experience, just our appreciation of the problem.” Eiji would later join Pixxel as Chief Science Officer.

By the end of the three months, the Pixxel picture was beginning to become clearer. With their demo satellite also coming together back in Chennai, the team began to look ahead to a launch date.

“We called ISRO and said we were an Indian company looking to launch our satellite sometime next year,” says Awais. “We asked if ISRO had any scheduled launches that we could get a ride on. They actually said ‘Sorry we don’t have a mandate to launch an Indian satellite at the moment. If you come as a foreign company then we can definitely help you.’ It was unfortunately a consequence of the regulatory scenario at the time. No one had any idea what to do with a private satellite company from India. So we had to find an alternate route to space.”

Through a connection at Techstars, they were able to connect with one of the administrators of the Russian space programme. “It was pretty straightforward,” recalled Awais. “They said here’s the schedule, here are the parameters, here’s the cost. If you sign the contract and pay, we’ll launch your satellite to space on one of our rockets. They couldn’t care less that we were kids.” The company booked their first official launch for mid-2020 on a Russian ‘Soyuz’ rocket (their ‘workhorse’ vehicle used for routine space travel).

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It felt like the runway was clear for their first launch. It would only be a few more months before they touched down in space and began their 50-year saga as one of the spacetech pioneers of India.

And then a global pandemic happened.

Pause

Covid brought their momentum to a screeching halt. Their production facility was temporarily closed down. They couldn’t get to the office. With nothing left to do in Chennai, the team retreated to their individual hometowns to wait out the pandemic.

The main issue, was that it wasn’t just time they were losing, it was money. Pixxel had entered the year with a fresh term-sheet of $3 million from a local VC for their seed round. It was the outcome of hundreds of conversations with investors in the months leading into the new year. But once the world shut down, their potential seed investor got cold feet, withdrawing their offer citing fears that the company wouldn’t be able to make it to space in the midst of a Covid-induced lockdown. It led to the first near-death experience for Pixxel. They suddenly found themselves weeks away from running out of cash.

Nearing the end of their pre-seed runway, the team faced a doubly daunting prospect. It was clear they wouldn’t be able to generate any revenue any time soon; and there was also no chance of meeting any new investors in person for the foreseeable future. “I reinitiated my conversations with Lightspeed and Blume – both of whom we had connected with in the months prior,” says Awais. “They had previously shown interest in investing in us but we had gone in a different direction the first time around. I asked them if they were still keen to come on board, and thankfully, they were! We hammered out the terms over Zoom calls (via my sketchy Internet in Aldur), and closed our initial seed round of $5 million.”

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“That round settled things down for us,” admits Awais. “The issue was that even leaving aside the pandemic, there wasn’t really a deep-tech ecosystem for startups in India at that point, much less space-tech. Making bets on ventures like ours with open technical questions was anything but commonplace. [Lightspeed’s] Hemant coming onboard was a big signal to the outside world. He could see the global commercial potential of our product, he understood the inflection points of the industry, and he was ready to join us at the ground floor of spacetech in India. It provided a measure of assurance to other investors who were weighing us up.”

Pixxel’s seed round ultimately also saw participation from Inventus Capital, Stanford Angels and the aforementioned Ryan Johnson, who also joined the Board of Directors of the company. The latter, as one of the most well-respected voices in the earth observation industry, helped to add both legitimacy and wisdom to Pixxel’s youthful enterprise.

For the most part, 2020 was a wash-out for the company. It was only towards the end of the year where they could resume operations in person, and begin building back up to a revised launch timeline. There was, however, an especially shiny silver lining that they could draw from 2020.

In the summer of 2020, the Indian government introduced a wave of deregulation efforts intended to inject some life into an economy that was being constricted by the coronavirus. Amongst these was a landmark set of reforms to liberalise the country’s space sector, marking a seismic shift in its space policy. The reforms aimed to open up space activities to private players, ending the monopoly of ISRO in several areas. Key changes included:

• allowing private companies to build rockets and satellites, conduct launches, and offer other space-based services end-to-end across the orbital value chain.
• the establishment of the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) under the Department of Space, as the single nodal body responsible for coordinating and regulating the activities of ‘non-government entities’ in India’s space industry
• enabling private entities to use ISRO’s infrastructure, test facilities, scientific and technical resources, and even data for their space programmes.
• a commitment to transform India’s space economy from a predominantly government-driven model to more of a public-private partnership, recognising that ISRO alone cannot serve the rising national and international demand for launches and other space-based services
• a shift in ISRO’s role, to focusing on high-stakes items like human spaceflight programmes, deep space exploration, scientific discovery, national defence initiatives etc, and leaving the private sector to pick up more of the slack regarding routine space activities

The reforms were expected to spur innovation, create jobs, engender self-reliance, and position India as a global hub for space technology.

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For startups like Pixxel, this meant a clearer regulatory pathway and the possibility of deeper collaboration with ISRO. Although it would take another three years for these to be crystallised into a new Indian Space Policy (which included a few more changes and a fully-articulated administrative apparatus), Pixxel would begin feeling the effects of this altered state by the end of 2020.

“We got a call from ISRO saying now that the environment for private space launches has opened up, why don’t you guys launch with us instead? We were more than happy to switch from Russia to back home. It made things far easier with exporting, shipping, documentation etc in any case. Given we had already spent some money booking the Soyuz launch, ISRO was also kind enough to give us a discount on the launch price this time around.”

With the economy opening up again, they re-booked the launch of their demo satellite on ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), set for take-off in February 2021.

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Feeling good about their chances, Pixxel went ahead and booked a second launch – this time for their first commercial Firefly satellite – for later in the year aboard a SpaceX rocket in the United States. As part of the deal, they had the option to defer this launch to 2022 if the initial timeline didn’t work out.

Here, I will share with you the phrase that came up most often in my conversations with several of the most seasoned founders and investors working in spacetech around the world – “Space is fucking hard.”

In 2021, the Pixxel team found out firsthand.

Take #1

The team was able to bring in the new year with good news – the opening of their first real office in Bangalore, inaugurated by the then-Chairman of ISRO Dr. K. Sivan.

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With a February launch timeline finally set in stone, the space was quickly filled with frenetic activity. In the weeks leading up to launch, the demo satellite (‘Anand’) was put through the paces in various rounds of tests.

“These include placing it on a vibration table, to see if it can survive the physical stress of a rocket launch,” explains Manas. “Then we put it into a Thermal Vacuum Chamber (TVAC), which exposes the satellite to the extreme hot and cold temperatures that it will face in space. We also conduct a series of Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) tests, which simulate various real-world scenarios that the satellite system will encounter. And those are still only a sliver of the entire testing process.”

Testing a satellite is basically the same thing as baking a baguette

The vendor worked on the satellite bus while the team focused on the assembly of their camera, coordinating with suppliers and specialised component manufacturers from around the world. Their final design took guidance from their initial batch of conversations with customers, and the precious input of Eiji Yafuso, who had become their hyperspectral Master Yoda. The camera operation was not without incident. Manas recalled that:

“We were getting the camera shipped to our Chennai office. It was being transported in a protective suitcase that was equipped with shock monitors. These are designed to tell us if the package has experienced significant physical impact. When we received it, we saw that the monitor had been triggered. We were sweating. We thought that it was finished.

The problem is that it’s not easy to test a space-grade camera. You typically need expensive, specialised equipment including precision optical benches, vacuum chambers, and highly calibrated light sources to simulate the conditions and targets the camera will encounter in orbit. We had to get creative.

After consulting with our vendor and Eiji, we used an ordinary DSLR camera lens as a test bed for our satellite camera. The challenge was that our space camera is designed to capture images from very far away, essentially focused at infinity. To simulate this on the ground, we needed to simulate that the camera was capturing a target from far away. So I flipped the DSLR lens around and placed our target at its focal point. This trick made the target appear as if it was coming from infinity, just like it would in space.

Using this approach, we were able to verify that our camera was still working correctly, despite the shipping incident. The experience gave me a deep insight into optics. I’m still not an expert, but I can tell when someone else is bullshitting now.”

Slowly but surely, Anand took shape. By the time the launch date came around, it had been almost two years since they’d first contracted their vendor to build the satellite for them. Anand, initially scheduled to be launched at the end of 2019, and then in mid-2020, was finally set to launch aboard ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C51/Amazonia-1) on 28 February 2021.

Anand, “India’s first private commercial and earth-imaging satellite”, ready for lift off in January 2021

A month before the launch, the Pixxel team had rented out some time at ISRO’s testing facility in Hyderabad for a round of tests. Nothing seemed untoward. Even just a week before the launch, it seemed like everything was in order. The vendor had also given the Pixxel team possession of the satellite, confirming that it had made it through all their own in-house tests. “We took their word at face value,” admitted Awais.

The company made arrangements for a launch party. They ordered catering. They took orders for T-shirt sizes. They booked buses for their team, their investors and well-wishers to the viewing gallery at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh), where the launch was taking place.

And then in a final round of tests before the satellite was due to be shipped out from Chennai, something didn’t add up. “The camera was working perfectly. The individual components of the satellite were functioning properly too, but the satellite refused to turn on as a whole. We realised there was something fundamentally wrong with the on-board computer.”

As they scrambled to fix the issue, they were obstructed by the paranoia of their partner in Chennai. “Our vendor refused to open up the satellite so we could diagnose the source of the issue. They were worried about revealing their IP, and didn’t want to open up the machine for close inspection by a third party.”

With the clock ticking down, and already past their deadline to ship Anand to the launch site, they had to take a brutally tough call.

“I had arrived in Sriharikota more than a week before launch along with two other engineers. We had to observe two days quarantine there because the pandemic was still ongoing. I remember being on the launchpad at SDSC a week before launch, completing all our documentation so we could get clearance for the arrival of Anand,” recalled Teja (their VP of Mechanical Engineering). “That’s when I got the call. I couldn’t believe it.”

The Pixxel founders confessed that the period immediately after the cancelled launch was probably their lowest point at the helm of the company. “We had to call the Chairman of New Space India Limited (which organises the launches), and tell him we wouldn’t be able to fly,” remembers Kshitij. “He was really nice about it to be fair. ISRO eventually replaced our satellite with ‘dummy mass’ to ensure that the payload of the rocket would be unchanged. The Chairman of ISRO called us up a couple of days later and said to keep our heads up. He told us even ISRO misses its deadlines and launch timelines. He said not to worry.”

“The worst part was travelling to Bangalore to break it to the team,” admits Awais. “Everyone was crushed. Our investors were spooked too. It was an awful situation.”

Having now had their first taste of the unforgiving nature of space-tech, they went back to the drawing board.

Reset

PSLV-C51/Amazonia-1 taking off on 28 February 2021

“Watching the PSLV take off the week after, knowing that we should have been on it…that hurt.”

After a few days nursing their disappointment, the team had to dust itself off and reorganise their efforts. They made a few snap decisions to get back on track. The main one was to scrap the planned launch of their first commercial Firefly satellite later that year (that satellite has been retrospectively nicknamed the ‘Dead Firefly’). Instead, they decided to build another demo satellite, this time completely in-house, as a back up in case they couldn’t resolve their issues with Anand. For Anand, they earmarked the next launch of the PSLV, in October 2021, as the next viable date of departure.

Importantly, they realised that they had made an error with their choice of vendor the first time around (“They learned more from us than we learned from them.”). Going forward, taking a leaf out of the page of SpaceX, they would inculcate a philosophy of vertical integration, endeavouring to build as much of their satellites themselves as possible.

Per Manas, “The issue with Anand was very frustrating. It was like, you have this black box. You know what it’s supposed to do but you don’t know what’s inside. Now it’s not working, and the person who’s made it won’t give you any clues. You have to make guesses for what’s gone wrong and try a hundred different things to fix it, and hope that one of them is correct.”

Once they made the decision to build another demo satellite (while simultaneously re-engineering Anand), the next immediate concern was to resolve their funding conundrum.

“We didn’t have the money to finance another demo satellite,” says Awais. “We had also lost some of our funds in ordering components for the Firefly, which now had to be discarded. The issue was that our seed round had been done in tranches, with only 3.25 million already in the bank. After the launch failure we were locked into a stalemate with our investors for a little bit. Luckily, there were new investors who still had enough faith in us to come onboard. Once we could guarantee the fresh infusion, our existing investors released the remaining funds too. That was enough to build another demo. We were back in business.”

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The team knuckled down for another push to get to space. By the middle of the year, they had concluded that Anand need a much heavier overhaul before it could face another launch attempt. They abandoned their October timeline and pushed it back a whole calendar year. It was tough to convince their investors of the decision, but they were certain it was the right call. The complete focus would be on building their second satellite (now first in line for launch) from scratch, preparing it for launch in the first quarter of the following year.

Without the dependence on an external partner, the Pixxel team finished the process of building and testing their satellite in just 9 months. They closed out the year with renewed optimism that 2022 would be the year they finally popped their space cherry.

The Life and Times of our Friendly Neighbourhood Space-Robots

Author’s note: If you’re keen to get back to the exciting launch stuff, continue on to the rest of the piece below. You’re totally free to skip this section and move on with your life. But if you’re a sicko, like me, and you want to get into the guts of building and launching a hyperspectral satellite, the Pixxel team was kind enough to give me a crash course. So if you’ve made it this far and what’s-another-fifteen-minutes-?, click here to learn more about what it takes to get something to space and build a business around it. If this doesn’t sound interesting and you’re already wondering why you’re still here, feel free to scroll on to the final leg of our story.

Take #2 and #3

Even before the launches got underway, Pixxel was able to celebrate the new year with the announcement of a $25 million Series A round of funding (eventually rising to $27 million), which was closed in the tail end of 2021. The round was led by Toronto-based Radical Ventures, and included participation from their existing investors along with Accenture Ventures.

It was an auspicious start to 2022. However, the real test of their fortunes would come on 1st April 2022, when they were scheduled to launch their (second) first hyperspectral demo satellite on board a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket off Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA.

This demo satellite was named Shakuntala, after the mother of the Sarda brothers, who had invested in Pixxel’s pre-seed round on the back of a certain promise. It was a 6U-CubeSat weighing ~15 kg, with 10m resolution, capable of capturing images across 150 bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Awais couldn’t travel to the US for the launch because of visa issues, so Pixxel was represented at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida by Kshitij along with a few of their engineers. Awais held fort in the office along with 30-35 of their team members, investors, and long-time supporters.

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Although they had accounted for everything when it came to the engineering and testing activity this time around, they couldn’t account for the weather.

“Three days before the launch, the weather conditions suggested a 75% probability of the launch going ahead. Two days before it shrunk to 50% because of an impending storm. The day before it had lowered to 25%. Kshitij called and said there was even a tornado warning in Florida, so it looked like we were going to be denied again. On the morning of the launch, it was looking doubly disappointing because we had all gathered for the launch party at our office.

Then two hours before the launch time, miraculously the sky cleared up. It suddenly looked like a perfect day in Cape Canaveral. Back home the launch was scheduled for 10 pm India time. I was still refreshing the weather app every ten minutes to be sure. As the minutes counted down and no other bad news arrived, suddenly it became real.”

With the deafening roar of the Falcon 9’s arsenal of nine Merlin engines, Pixxel’s first ever hyperspectral satellite was finally headed to space.