Dhruva Space

Dhruva Space builds most of what a small satellite mission needs apart from the payload. It makes satellite platforms, the bus that carries a customer's instrument, and deployers that push small satellites off a rocket. It also runs ground stations and sells their time as a service. Customers can buy one piece or the whole mission.

Sanjay Nekkanti, Krishna Teja Penamakuru, Abhay Egoor and Chaitanya Dora Surapureddy founded it in 2012, eight years before India opened spaceflight to private companies. When IN-SPACe started authorising private payloads in June 2022, Dhruva was one of the first two companies it approved, and its satellite deployer flew that month. Its first satellites, Thybolt-1 and Thybolt-2, reached orbit in November 2022. A version of its P-30 platform flew on POEM-3 in January 2024 and worked as designed. In August 2025 LEAP-1, its first commercial mission, was deployed from a Falcon 9 with payloads for Australian customers.

In January 2026 a PSLV failure destroyed five Dhruva deployers and the satellites inside them, including Dhruva's own Thybolt-3. The rocket failed, not Dhruva's hardware. Government money followed. A ₹105 crore grant from India's research and innovation fund went to Project Garud, a platform for 500 kg satellites. In July the Antariksh Venture Capital Fund, which IN-SPACe anchors, made its first investment, ₹60 crore, in Dhruva. Dhruva is also one of Pixxel's three partners in the consortium that will build and run a national Earth observation constellation for IN-SPACe.