India's space start-up Team Indus aims for the moon with backing from tech veterans
I invested in Team Indus because of their audacious goals, says Nilekani
Team Indus was a bunch of friends, from information technology (IT), aviation and investment banking sectors, who came together to take on a challenge no other Indian technology company had even thought of. “We were surprised to find there was no other team from India, despite the fact that in every global space technology institute, you will see a major contribution from Indian scientists,” says Dilip Chabria, co-founder and corporate relations lead, Team Indus.
After registering for the Google Lunar programme, the founders created the firm called Axiom Research Labs in February of 2011.
The company was founded by Rahul Narayan, an IIT-Delhi graduate and now the tech lead at Indus Team. Chabria who is an engineer and has worked with an advertisement firm for five years and many more years in the IT sector, Julius Amrit has worked with the investment banking industry and now heads the investment lead, Sameer Joshi, a former Indian Air Force pilot is the mission architect and Indranil Chakrobarthy, an aersopace engineer.
For a start-up that has been formed four years back the recent fund raising seems a tad late. “It’s been four years since our inception, we are clearly an old start-up in the aerospace industry. It has been four long year of journey,” said Chabria.
It’s this audacious aim of the founders and the team members to create a low-cost transport to the moon that surprised many, and at a time when India is bursting at seams with the entrepreneurial success stories it has taken them almost two years to raise their pre-Series A round of funding.
"Everything took time. Right from hiring people, getting advisors on board, and even taking the story to investors. When a group of IT professionals would approach an advisor who has worked on space technologies they would assume we want to develop software for space simulation. Challenges were plenty, but the biggest was to make people aware of what we wanted to do," Chabria reminisces. As he points out that every start-up has challenges, in case of Team Indus it was in multiples.
The company recently closed their pre Series ‘A’ funding from a clutch of entrepreneurs including Nandan Nilekani, Ajay Chowdhry, Rajiv Mody of Sasken, Anand Deshpande co-founder of Persistent Systems, serial entrepreneur Vishal Gondal and Naveen Tewari of InMobi. They did also raise seed money of $500,000 from group of investors some time ago.
However, the completion of this space mission will cost the team anywhere between $30-40 million, Chabria already feels that there are chances that the cost may go up by another 10-15 per cent. In January this year, Team Indus won the milestone prize of $1 million for landing system. The system includes all hardware and software that support a soft-landing of the Google Lunar XPRIZE spacecraft on the Moon.“I invested in Team Indus because of their audacious goals and this truly the kind of innovation and entrepreneurship we want in India. I believe they are bringing in best in class technology to solve a very sophisticated challenge in a very innovative way,” said Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys who was also the chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India.
What is commendable about Team Indus is the fact that they are competing with the best in the world in the space and with robust financial backing. The other two which also won prize amount of $1 million for landing were Austrobotic and Moon Express. Astrobotic was established in 2008 as a spin-off from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, and Moon Express has the backing of private investors and has tie-up with NASA.
"Even as Bangalore has been the IT and now start-up capital of India, it is also the aerospace capital of India. However this has mainly been driven by the Public Sector. Just like the US has seen private companies like SpaceX change the industry, to truly leverage India's opportunities in space we need to encourage organizations like Team Indus," added Nilekani.
Said Vishal Gondal a serial entrepreneur who is also one of the investors in Team Indus in the pre series A round: "I remember the early 90s when I started Indiagames and would tell people that I am making mobile games on which users will spend money and time. People would laugh at me. We need people to do crazy stuff. Disruption in the area of space technology has been a focus of government institutes and defence companies. But real innovation and disruption happens when private players jump in it. I am backing the IP that they will create overtime," he added.