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Every few months, there's another Indian spacetech startup making the news. One is testing a rocket engine, another is putting satellites into orbit, while someone else has just raised fresh funding. A decade ago, most of these headlines would've belonged to ISRO. Today, many of them belong to startups.
A recent analysis caught our attention. IIT Madras alumni have founded 11 spacetech startups, the highest in the country. BITS Pilani is just behind with 10, followed by IIT Kharagpur with 7 and IIT Bombay with 5. The one-startup gap between IIT Madras and BITS isn't really what stood out. The list itself did. Nearly every name belongs to an engineering campus.
That says something about how India's space industry is evolving.
Not very long ago, building a space company in India wasn't even something most founders considered. The ecosystem simply wasn't there. The government's decision to open the sector in 2020 changed that. Startups could suddenly work with ISRO's infrastructure, test their technology and think beyond research projects. Building rockets and satellites slowly stopped sounding like an impossible idea.
You can see the shift in the companies that have emerged since then. Skyroot became India's first spacetech unicorn this year. Pixxel is building a global Earth observation business. Agnikul Cosmos is working on launch vehicles with 3D-printed rocket engines. Digantara is tracking objects in space.
They're solving very different problems, but many of them have something in common: they started in places where students had access to research labs, incubators and people who were willing to bet on ambitious ideas.
Maybe that's what this ranking is really measuring.
For years, engineering colleges competed on placements. The biggest success stories were students who landed jobs at Google, Microsoft or Apple. Now another scoreboard is emerging, one that tracks the companies graduates go on to build instead.
