OXG Space raises ₹17 crore for in-orbit relay and computing of Earth-observation data

Bengaluru spacetech startup OXG Space has raised ₹17 crore (about $1.8 million) in a round led by Aum Ventures through its India Innovation Fund II. Skyroot Aerospace co-founders Pawan Kumar Chandana and Bharath Daka, and Cosmoserve founder Dr Chiran Phanindra, also participated.

The company, founded by former ISRO engineers Akash Shetty and Sanjay Gorur, is building shared orbital nodes that relay, process and fuse data from multiple Earth-observation satellites in space. It says observation-to-insight currently takes four to 12 hours.

The money funds Mission Synapse, a 12-month in-orbit demonstration of three technologies: a Ka-band phased-array antenna starting at about 1 Gbps with a roadmap to 64 Gbps per spacecraft, a deployable mesh reflector, and a scalable deployable solar array. OXG targets Indian sovereign programmes and international satellite operators.

Why it matters: In-orbit relay and processing could cut the wait between satellite capture and usable information, a constraint for any Earth-observation user far from ground stations. The demonstration is still unproven and has no stated launch date.