Agnikul Cosmos raised $11 million in Series A round led by Mayfield India.
Agnikul Cosmos, a Chennai-based startup participated in a Series A funding round and raised $11 million. The funding was led by Mayfield India. Speciale Invest, Artha Venture Fund and pi Ventures were among the other investors who also participated in the round. Besides this, BEENEXT, Globevestor, LionRock Capital and a clutch of angel investors comprising Anand Mahindra, Naval Ravikanth, Balaji Srinivasan, Nithin Kamath, Abhishek Singhania, Aarthi Singhania and Sriram Krishnan, Anicut Angel Fund and LestVenture and many more also participated in the round.
They declared in an official statement, that post-funding, Mayfield India’s managing partner Vikram Godse will be joining the board of Agnikul Cosmos. The funds raised will be utilized in expansion of the team and escalate the technology and infrastructure.
The small satellite market is underserved globally, and Agnikul will standardize the access in this market. They follow a customer focused approach and continuously innovate which enable them to stand at par and succeed globally. The team shows enthusiasm to work with Srinath and Moin on their journey to space as said by Vikram Godse, the Managing Partner at Mayfield India.
The company has also raised a great amount of $3.1 million in March 2020 in Pre-Series A funding and in 2019 it raised the capital funding by Dpeciale Invest.
The startup, Agnikul Cosmos was founded by Srinath Ravichandran, Moin SPM and Prof SR Chakravarthy in 2017. It aims to develop India’s private small satellite launch vehicle. The core product of the company is Agnibaan. It is the smallest launch vehicle capable of carrying up to 100 kg of payload to Low Earth orbits. It can access both low and high inclination orbits and is perfectly developed for accessing more than 10 launch ports.
The startup designs, manufactures, tests and launches orbital-class rockets for micro and nano satellites. They are currently catering their services for the National Centre for Combustion R&D at IIT-Madras. The team comprises rocket scientists, engineers, ex-bankers and space lawyers. As said by the company, the uniqueness of the team is their greatest strength. They aim to develop space economics for every citizen of India.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has affected hundreds of businesses. In these tough times, the company faced some delays. However, we are eagerly waiting to launch our first mission in the second half of the next year.” shared Srinath.
He further said the startup has temporarily paused all of its liquid oxygen-based testings in order to assure delivery of oxygen to masses across the country during the pandemic.
“Besides all of these, we are also associating people to the vendors we toiled with for oxygen whenever they extend to us. We are trying our best to help in every way we can.” the co-founders described.
Moin said in the past year, the company had test-fired the world’s prime 3D printed rocket engine Agnilet and other tests are dated for coming days.
“We aim to get exceptionally good to orbit in the coming two years. The efforts we made are great and for now, we want to keep this as our focal point.” He said.
While commenting on the modern funding trends in the space sector, Srinath described that since the doors of the space sector are opened and In-SPACe is launched, thinking of investors has taken a turn. The investors are now looking to invest in spacetech players.
