On a recent episode of Leaders Lab, Rahul Chandra sat down with Pawan Kumar Chandana, Co-founder and CEO of Skyroot Aerospace.

The conversation traced how two former ISRO scientists built India’s first private rocket company. It is a story about technical choices, capital constraints, hiring, and the patience required to build in one of the hardest engineering categories.

Inside Skyroot Aerospace’s Hyderabad campus, Vikram-S hangs on the wall. It is the Vikram rocket that made Skyroot the first Indian private company to reach space in 2022.

What followed was not a single breakthrough moment. It was a long sequence of decisions that helped turn Skyroot into India’s first spacetech unicorn.

THE ISRO FOUNDATION

Pawan grew up in Vizag with an early interest in entrepreneurship. At IIT Kharagpur, he saw batchmates think seriously about starting companies. But when ISRO came to campus to recruit directly from IITs, he chose a different path.

“I thought: let me first learn what the most fascinating machine humans have ever built actually is.”

He joined the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram. What he found there was ISRO’s core operating culture: building with discipline, restraint, and limited resources.

That mindset stayed with him.

ISRO had gone to Mars on its first attempt and landed on the lunar south pole through frugal engineering and deep technical capability. For Pawan, this became an important reference point. Complex engineering did not always need unlimited budgets. It needed clarity, constraint, and execution.

His most important project at ISRO was LVM3, India’s largest rocket.

“I was down in tears during the first launch. It was magic.”

He had expected to spend his career there. Then he began to see a larger opportunity outside the institution.

WHY LAUNCH BECAME THE PROBLEM TO SOLVE

India had several structural advantages in space.

It had launch pads close to the equator, a large coastline, a supply chain built over decades, and a talent base shaped by institutions such as ISRO and the Indian Institute of Space Technology.

What it did not have was a private company building a global launch business from India.

For Pawan, that gap mattered.

“There’s no fun in building something that many people can do. The fact that very few people can make it, that is the opportunity.”

The global launch market was highly concentrated. A small number of players controlled most orbital launches. At the same time, small satellite operators needed more dedicated launch options.

Rideshare missions could take satellites to space, but they could not always take them to the exact orbit the customer wanted, at the exact time the customer needed.

That was the market opening Skyroot chose to build for. The difficulty of the problem was not a deterrent. It was part of the moat. 

BUILDING FOR THE MARKET

Skyroot’s early strategy was shaped by one question: what kind of rocket does the customer actually need?

Pawan did not see the opportunity as a pure technology demonstration. The company needed to build a rocket that was reliable, cost-competitive, and correctly sized for the satellite market.

Most future satellites, he believed, would fall below 500 kg.

A 1,000 kg rocket would be too large for many customers. A 100 kg rocket would be too limited. Skyroot had to build for the middle of the market, while staying flexible enough to adjust as satellite sizes changed.

As the market evolved, the company’s design evolved with it. Satellite requirements moved from 100 kg to 200 kg to 300 kg. Skyroot’s rocket architecture had to absorb that shift without restarting from zero.

That led to a modular design.

This is one of the more important lessons from Skyroot’s journey. The best technical choices in deep tech are often market choices first. In Skyroot’s case, architecture followed the customer’s need for satellite size, orbit access, reliability, and speed.

For deeptech investors in India or worldwide looking to invest in this sector, this distinction matters. It signals that the technology was not built in isolation. It was shaped by the economics of the commercial space sector in India.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF SPEED

Skyroot’s Vikram vehicles are India’s first all-carbon-fibre rockets.

The choice was practical. Carbon fibre allowed the company to simplify production, reduce material complexity, and improve consistency. A more uniform structure made manufacturing easier to scale and reliability easier to test.

The same thinking shaped its engine design.

Skyroot designed liquid fuel engines for 3D printing. This reduced the number of components and shortened qualification timelines. Instead of qualifying hundreds of individual parts through a long sequence, the company could simplify assemblies and move faster.

“We chose architectures that are reliable, mass-producible, and directly fit for what the market needs. Everything else flowed from that problem statement.”

This is what stood out in the conversation. Skyroot’s technical choices were not presented as engineering flexes. They were tied to speed, manufacturability, customer needs, and long-term reliability.

THE FUNDRAISE THAT ALMOST DIDN’T HAPPEN

By 2020, Skyroot had been operating for two years on $1.5 million in seed capital.

It had around 40 people on payroll. It had no finished hardware to show investors. The Series A process had just begun when COVID hit.

Factories shut down. Hardware progress stopped. Investor priorities changed. The company’s runway began to tighten.

Pawan describes fundraising in deep tech as its own form of rocket science.

“We deal with two rocket sciences. One is the actual rocket. The other is raising capital for the rocket.”

At one point, the company had only four to six months left before it would have run out of money.

The Greenko Group founders stepped in first with a bridge loan, then led the Series A. At the time, it was one of the largest deep-tech fundraises in India’s space sector.

The lesson Pawan took from that period was direct: start fundraising earlier than feels necessary. In deep tech, product timelines are long, and uncertainty is high. Runway can shrink faster than the engineering calendar.

But there was another lesson too. In deep tech, investors need to be brought into the technical journey.

Skyroot showed investors the hardware, the risks, and the logic behind each engineering decision. Conviction was built through transparency, not just milestones.

By 2022, the market had changed. More funds had developed a space thesis. Skyroot had helped shape that shift through years of conversations, creating a stronger reference point for early-stage investors, every aerospace startup VC, and any Series A investor evaluating space technology from India.

PEOPLE ENGINEERING

Skyroot now has a team of around 400 people.

Fewer than 10% came from the space industry. The rest came from adjacent sectors such as automotive, defence, and aerospace. Many had to be trained in rocket engineering on the job.

Pawan calls this “people engineering.”

In a category where ready-made talent is limited, building the team becomes part of the technology strategy.

Skyroot’s approach has been to give responsibility early when people show capability. Several young leaders now manage large teams inside the company. The organisation does not wait for tenure to catch up with ability.

The co-founder relationship also reflects this balance.

Pawan describes himself as mechanical and aggressive. His co-founder, Bharath Daka, also from ISRO, brings an electronics background and a more grounded approach.

“1 + 1 = 11 when we sit on something together.”

Both grew up in Vizag. Both worked at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. They became flatmates at ISRO and eventually left together to start Skyroot.

INDIA’S SPACE MOMENT

India’s space startup ecosystem has expanded rapidly. More than 200 startups now operate in the sector, with some estimates placing the number closer to 300.

Serious companies have raised institutional capital. Prototypes are being tested. The government has opened ISRO facilities to startups, giving them access to infrastructure that would otherwise be impossible to build independently.

The planned ₹1,000 crore government space fund is also expected to attract private co-investment into the sector.

India’s geography adds another advantage.

Sriharikota’s location near the equator gives rockets a natural velocity boost at launch. This reduces the fuel required to reach orbit. India is also developing a second launch range at Kulasekharapatnam in Tamil Nadu, designed for southward launches.

For Pawan, this is not a small advantage.

“Europe ships its rockets to French Guiana, thousands of kilometres, because that is the best access to space. We have two of those locations building right here.”

This is why venture capital in space technology is becoming a more serious conversation in India. The opportunity is not only about a few private rocket companies. It is about infrastructure, policy, talent, launch geography, and the emergence of a broader private space economy.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Skyroot is preparing for India’s first private orbital launch attempt.

Reaching orbit requires sustaining a velocity of 7.7 km per second. Pawan describes it as one of the hardest engineering feats a civilisation can attempt. Only a small number of private companies globally have achieved it.

The company’s next goal is to move from launch success to repeated orbital launches, customer revenue, and profitability over the next two to three years.

The longer-term ambition is to establish Skyroot as one of the top five launch providers in the world.

“Space is global. More than 90% of our market will be international. We’re building the hardest product in engineering, from India, for the world.”

If Pawan had to name a rocket after a cricketer, he says he would choose Rahul Dravid, not Virat Kohli.

“It’s a long game. You need predictable performance and the patience to play it out.”