PierSight

PierSight builds synthetic aperture radar. It makes images with radio waves, so it can see through cloud and in the dark. Its main project is Varuna, a planned constellation of 32 satellites that each carry a radar and an AIS receiver. AIS is the identification signal that ships broadcast. Because each satellite carries both, the radar is meant to find ships that have switched their AIS off, which the maritime industry calls dark ships.

Gaurav Seth founded PierSight in Ahmedabad in 2023 with Vinit Bansal. Seth had built radar payloads at ISRO for NISAR, Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3. In December 2024, about fifteen months after its pre-seed round, the company flew a small radar demonstrator on POEM-4, ISRO's orbital test platform. The demonstrator stayed attached to the platform. ISRO later reported that every private payload on POEM-4 completed its experiments.

The first commercial satellite, Varuna 2.0, is now scheduled for 2027. In September 2026 KSAT, the Norwegian ground-station company, signed a letter of intent to evaluate its data for KSAT's maritime surveillance service. PierSight also supplies the radar for the Pixxel-led consortium that is building a 12-satellite Earth observation constellation for India. In June 2026 it launched a second product, Vidura, a radar carried on drones that can see through forest canopy.