When Vikram-1 lifted off from Sriharikota on July 18, it was more than just another rocket launch. It marked India’s first orbital launch by a private company, with Skyroot Aerospace achieving a milestone that once seemed like a distant dream. But the journey to that historic moment did not begin in a state-of-the-art facility backed by deep pockets. It started in a modest office in Hyderabad, where two former ISRO scientists took a gamble on building India’s first private space launch company.
In 2017, Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka were working at ISRO when they read a draft of India’s Space Activities Bill and saw a clear sign that private companies might soon be allowed to build and launch their own rockets. They took a big risk, quit their government jobs, and started Skyroot in 2018. However, at that time, India’s space sector was still largely closed to private players, and it was difficult to find any investor willing to back them.
The only person who wrote the first cheque was Mukesh Bansal, the founder of Myntra and Cultfit, who infused capital into the company in 2018, nearly two years before any institutional venture funds came on board. According to Tracxn data, Bansal invested about $1.3 million across multiple funding rounds, which amounts to roughly Rs 12 crore, and he became the company’s sole angel investor, putting his money into a venture that many thought might never be allowed to launch a rocket.
The government officially opened the space sector to private players in 2020, and this was the turning point that Skyroot had been waiting for, because soon after, institutional investors started coming on board and the company’s growth became rapid. In November 2022, Skyroot launched Vikram-S, which became India’s first privately built rocket to reach space, and then in May 2026, the company raised about $60 million, which is around Rs 570 crore, becoming India’s first spacetech unicorn with a valuation of $1.1 billion, or about Rs 10,600 crore.
Mukesh Bansal’s early trust in the company has paid off massively because he still holds 5.7% of Skyroot and his current stake is valued at $63.2 million (over Rs 600 crore) today, according to Tracxn. He has already taken more than Rs 100 crore off the table through partial exits by selling a small portion of his shares, and when you add the two together, Bansal is sitting on a total value of over Rs 700 crore, which translates to a return of almost 60 times his original investment of Rs 12 crore, all made at a time when nobody could say for certain that an Indian startup would ever be allowed to build a rocket that worked.
