Spacetech startup Agnikul Cosmos Pvt Ltd on Tuesday said it has raised Series B funding of $26.7 million (Rs 200 crore) from Celesta Capital, Rocketship.vc, Artha Venture Fund and Artha Select Fund.
Existing backers pi Ventures, Speciale Invest and Mayfield India doubled down on their spacetech bet by participating in the round.
So far, the company has raised $40 million in total funding rounds.
Agnikul plans to deploy the fresh proceeds to scale its existing technology for commercialization, as well as invest in facilities such as mobile launchpads and other test rigs, hiring talent across teams like production, operations and technology.
Founded in 2017 by Srinath Ravichandran, Moin SPM, and SR Chakravarthy, Agnikul was incubated at IIT Madras. The spacetech startup aims to build India’s first private small satellite rocket, Agnibaan, that will be capable of carrying up to 100 kg of payload to low Earth orbits up to 700 km.
“With this capital, we will continue to drive our technology forward, building facilities and testing systems that we need to deliver the product for our customers,” said Ravichandran.
In 2021, Agnikul raised $11 million in a Series A funding round led by Mayfield India, along with pi Ventures, Speciale Invest, Artha Venture Fund, among others. The round also saw participation from angel investors Anand Mahindra, Nithin Kamath and Naval Ravikant, among others.
Meanwhile, Celesta Capital is a deeptech-focused VC firm founded in 2013 by Michael Marks, Nicholas Brathwaite, Sriram Viswanathan, and Lip-Bu Tan. It primarily invests in companies in the US, India, and Israel.
In an interaction with VCCircle, Arun Kumar, Celesta’s managing partner said that the firm plans to hike its cumulative India portfolio from the existing 15% to 25% or higher of its total around $1.1 billion corpus raised across four funds.
The firm co-led the $10 million Series A funding round of construction services startup Brick & Bolt, with Accel, earlier in January this year.
The spacetech sector has also seen an increase in terms of growth-stage funding in the past few years with spacetech firm Skyroot raising $50.5 million in a Series B round in 2022.