Earlier this week, five people who touch every layer of the AI supply chain sat down at the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, where they talked with this editor about everything from chip shortages to orbital data centers to the possibility that the whole architecture that undergirds the tech is wrong.
Skyroot Aerospace has become India’s first space tech unicorn after raising $60 million in a new investment ahead of the maiden orbital launch of its Vikram-1 rocket in the coming weeks.
The funding round valued the Hyderabad-based startup at $1.1 billion on a pre-money basis and included about $50 million in primary equity co-led by Sherpalo Ventures and GIC, along with around $10 million in structured debt managed by funds affiliated with BlackRock, the company told TechCrunch.
The investment comes as Skyroot prepares for the first orbital launch attempt by an Indian private company. The Vikram-1 rocket was flagged off to India’s spaceport on the southern island of Sriharikota in April, and the startup is targeting a June launch after completing flight qualification tests and beginning integration and launch campaign activities.
Founded in 2018 by former Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) engineers Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, Skyroot is building small satellite launch rockets broadly comparable to those developed by U.S.-based companies such as Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace, with Vikram-1 designed to carry payloads of up to 350 kilograms (around 772 pounds) into low Earth orbit.
Skyroot’s latest valuation more than doubles from the $500 million pre-money valuation it secured during its previous funding round in 2023, as global investors increase bets on India’s emerging private space sector.
The round drew participation from Playbook Partners, Arkam Ventures, and the founders of Greenko Group. Ram Shriram, founder of Sherpalo Ventures and a board member at Alphabet, will join Skyroot’s board.
Skyroot co-founders Naga Bharath Daka (left) and Pawan Kumar Chandana (Right)Image Credits:Skyroot
Skyroot declined to disclose revenue figures or customer backlog details, but said demand for dedicated launches for small satellite operators was strong, with about one-third of expected demand coming from India and the rest from international customers.
Skyroot first drew attention in November 2022 after launching Vikram-S, a suborbital rocket mission that marked India’s first privately developed rocket launch.
The new capital, Skyroot said, would be used to scale manufacturing, increase the launch cadence of Vikram-1 missions, and support development of Vikram-2, a heavier-lift launch vehicle expected to debut in 2027.
Vikram-2 is being designed as a one-ton-class launch vehicle powered by a cryogenic stage, expanding Skyroot’s ability to serve more complex satellite missions and compete in the growing global market for small satellite launches.
Skyroot’s rise comes as India pushes to expand its share of the global space economy by opening the sector to private companies and leveraging lower manufacturing and launch costs to compete globally. India’s space economy is estimated at $8.4 billion and projected to grow to $44 billion by 2033, while the country had nearly 400 space-tech startups as of early 2026, according to government estimates.
The startup’s upcoming Vikram-1 mission comes as India seeks to build additional commercial launch capacity alongside the state-run ISRO, which has faced setbacks in recent missions, including two consecutive launch failures. Reforms introduced since 2020 have allowed private firms to access ISRO facilities and participate in end-to-end space activities, helping spur the emergence of startups across launch systems, satellites, and propulsion technologies. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Jagmeet covers startups, tech policy-related updates, and all other major tech-centric developments from India for TechCrunch. He previously worked as a principal correspondent at NDTV.
You can contact or verify outreach from Jagmeet by emailing mail@journalistjagmeet.com.
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Earlier this week, five people who touch every layer of the AI supply chain sat down at the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, where they talked with this editor about everything from chip shortages to orbital data centers to the possibility that the whole architecture that undergirds the tech is wrong.
On stage with TechCrunch: Christophe Fouquet, CEO of ASML, the Dutch company that holds a monopoly on the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines without which modern chips would not exist; Francis deSouza, COO of Google Cloud, who is overseeing one of the biggest infrastructure bets in corporate history; Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, a $15 billion physical AI company that started in simulation and has since moved into defense; Dimitry Shevelenko, the chief business officer of Perplexity, the AI-native search-to-agents company; and Eve Bodnia, a quantum physicist who left academia to challenge the foundational architecture most of the AI industry takes for granted at her startup, Logical Intelligence. (Meta’s former chief AI scientist, Yan LeCun, signed on as founding chair of its technical research board earlier this year.)
Here’s what the five had to say:
The bottlenecks are real
The AI boom is running into hard physical limits, and the constraints begin further down the stack than many may realize. Fouquet was the first to say it, describing a “huge acceleration of chips manufacturing,” while expressing his “strong belief” that despite all that effort, “for the next two, three, maybe five years, the market will be supply limited,” meaning the hyperscalers — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta — aren’t going to get all the chips they’re paying for, full stop.
DeSouza highlighted how big — and how fast growing — an issue this is, reminding the audience that Google Cloud’s revenue crossed $20 billion last quarter, growing 63%, while its backlog — the committed but not yet delivered revenue — nearly doubled in a single quarter, from $250 billion to $460 billion. “The demand is real,” he said with impressive calm.
For Younis, the constraint comes primarily from elsewhere. Applied Intuition builds autonomy systems for cars, trucks, drones, mining equipment and defense vehicles, and his bottleneck isn’t silicon — it’s the data that one can only gather by sending machines into the real world and watching what happens. “You have to find it from the real world,” he said, and no amount of synthetic simulation fully closes that gap. “There will be a long time before you can fully train models that run on the physical world synthetically.”
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The energy problem is also real
If chips are the first bottleneck, energy is the one looming behind it. DeSouza confirmed that Google is exploring data centers in space as a serious response to energy constraints. “You get access to more abundant energy,” he noted. Of course, even in orbit, it isn’t simple. DeSouza observed space is a vacuum, so eliminates convection, leaving radiation as the only way to shed heat into the surrounding environment (a much slower and harder-to-engineer process than the air and liquid cooling systems that data centers rely on today). But the company is still treating it as a legitimate path.
The deeper argument de Souza made, somewhat unsurprisingly, was about efficiency through integration. Google’s strategy of co-engineering its full AI stack — from custom TPU chips through to models and agents — pays dividends in watts per flop that a company buying off-the-shelf components simply can’t replicate, he suggested. “Running Gemini on TPUs is much more energy efficient than any other configuration,” because chip designers know what’s coming in the model before it ships, he said. In a world where energy availability is becoming a massive constraint on how far this tech can go, that kind of vertical integration is a major competitive advantage.
Fouquet’s echoed the point later
Five architects of the AI economy explain where the wheels are coming off TechCrunch
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