Google will invest in the Indian space industry in a Bengalore-based startup called Pixxel. The Alphabet-owned company, based in Bengaluru, is funding a $36 million Series B funding round for Pixxel, a space tech startup. The government has announced a new privatisation policy in April.
Pixxel, which was established in 2019, is a satellite-image startup that aims to build a constellation of satellites that can identify mineral deposits or productivity crops by analyzing the spectral signature of an image. The initiative encourages startups to provide broadband services like Starlink and power applications like tracking supply chains.
Awais Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Pixxel, said that Pixxel will now be the most valuable space tech company in India after this investment. The satellite, launched in April last year, is named Shakuntala and is designed to monitor climate change.
Last year at Google for India 2022, Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, announced a $10 billion Google for India Digitization Fund to accelerate India's digital economy. In addition to its involvement in the space tech startup, Google has been heavily investing in India's Digitisation Fund, a venture funded company.
It's not the first time the company has been working with Google, Ahmed said. We work with satellite data and Google does a lot of work around that with agriculture and the environment, he said. They also have Google Earth, so a combination of that led to them seeing a benefit. Pixxel is also preparing six more satellites to launch next year, including two that will be able to land on the moon. The company also wants to hire more engineers for its analytics.
After his visit to Elon Musk's SpaceX, Ahmed said he was inspired to do that, which he said was inspired by the need to have a space tech startup. At the same time, he had participated in a student competition to create a demonstration hyperloop transport pod. Ahmed also declares that he and his co-founder Kshitij Khandelwal want to build an AI model that could utilize satellite data to forecast crop yields, detect illegal mining, and track natural disasters.
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