00:00My colleague was just talking about some of the reaction to the India budget just over the weekend.
00:05We're seeing more allocation for the space industry.
00:09What is your sense of, does that meet your expectations in terms of support for the sector?
00:15I think it does.
00:16Not so many unique things in this budget for the private space sector.
00:21We had seen a lot, many more of those the previous year and the year before that.
00:25But I think it's still good that there was an increase in the budget to the Department of Space through which all the space programs take root.
00:33The predominant one of which is the human space flight program for launching Indian astronauts to space and to build our own Indian space station in the coming few years.
00:44The work on that has been going on well.
00:46So I think it's good.
00:47We could also see a lot of increase in the budget for defense applications.
00:51And quite a bit of the defense budget has been routed towards space applications.
00:56Space is starting to become a new mode of domain where countries are looking at how to build technological superiority and space technology becomes a critical part of that.
01:06So I think given those two aspects in the budget, it's looking like a positive few years for space technology in India.
01:12Given how important it is, do you think the government needs to classify space assets as critical infrastructure?
01:21Yeah, so I think they have been doing that in a variety of different ways.
01:24So in the last year's budget, for example, there was a deep tech fund of quite a few billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars that was announced.
01:33And it will be dispersed through the RDI funds, Research and Development for India funds.
01:39And space technology has been described as a sunrise sector, a sector that is important for the nation.
01:45And there will be long-term loans and grants and equity positions that the government of India, through sovereign funds and through second-level asset managers and banks,
01:55that will be providing these fundings to companies like us that are building infrastructure projects.
01:59So in a way, the sunrise sector label for space technology in India is something that has already been recognized.
02:06But I think, you know, looking forward, a lot more procurement of services from space technology companies will just catalyze the economy in India a lot more than just grants and equity positions.
02:18Is that the primary source of funding for your company or do you also get a lot of interest from local VCs?
02:24What is the proportion of funds?
02:26Yeah, so I think, you know, just taking a little bit of a broader look at the VC ecosystem in India for space technology,
02:34we started the company in 2019, back when no one knew, you know, what space technology investment meant or whatever hardware meant, right?
02:42So when we go to an investor and talk about launching satellites to space and we were just, you know, freshly graduated college students then,
02:48it was a little bit difficult to convince people to put in the money from India because the ecosystem just hasn't developed quite a bit yet.
02:56Compared to, let's say, Silicon Valley where, you know, these funds have seen a lot of returns from a lot of risky ventures and they have a lot of dry powder that they had.
03:05And so we had to bring in a lot of international investment into Pixel.
03:08The first two rounds of funding were from Indian angel investors and funds, but when we went to our series A of $27 million or our series B of about $60 million,
03:18those were led by international organizations from the U.S., from the U.K.
03:23And the Indian VC ecosystem is gradually catching up, but I think, you know, for the large round still, the opening up of the FDI,
03:31the foreign direct investment policy in India was a critical aspect in sort of catalyzing that.
03:36So most of the funding that has gone into Indian space tech companies, you're right, is that it has come from venture capital and private equity funding.
03:43But we need to start seeing a lot more of government procurement as a revenue that will really make the ecosystem go that next level higher.
03:50And you just clinched a key contract as well, but I wanted your thoughts.
03:54I mean, we talk about this hyper-spectral imaging, right?
03:58What is the difference in that kind of technology and what it enables companies and perhaps governments to do?
04:04What are some of the government applications that you're seeing in this?
04:07Yeah, so when we started the company in 2019, there was a very simple vision.
04:12Let's build a health monitor for the planet.
04:14And just like humans can go to a hospital and get regular health check-ups to see what's going right and wrong with our body,
04:20we need to be seeing what's going right or wrong with the body for planet Earth.
04:25And we said, okay, satellite data seems to be the data set for us to be able to see it at such large scales
04:30and bring in artificial intelligence to build what we call planetary intelligence.
04:34But we realized very quickly that existing satellites up there, which were multi-spectral or radar,
04:38they could see a lot of things, but there were many things that were invisible.
04:41For example, if we wanted to see diseases in crops or we wanted to see pest infestations,
04:48we wanted to see if there were invisible methane leaks from natural gas pipelines,
04:52underground oil leaks, forest fires.
04:54A lot of these things were invisible to these satellites up in orbit because, you know,
04:58you can't see them with human eyes, you can't see them with normal cameras.
05:01So we had to build a different kind of a camera and that's where hyper-spectral imaging came into the picture.
05:06What these cameras do basically in a very simplified fashion is they take all of the light coming into the camera
05:13and they split them into hundreds of wavelengths.
05:16Human eyes can see only three wavelengths, so red, green and blue.
05:19Whereas our hyper-spectral cameras can see hundreds of wavelengths, 300 to be precise.
05:24And so what that means is when we are looking at a farm, we are not only seeing that it's a farm and it's green,
05:28we are seeing if there is a change in the spectral signature.
05:32It's like super vision in a way, right?
05:34It's like an X-ray machine from space.
05:36Given these sort of possible national security or government applications,
05:41have you seen, given how space is such a hotly contested arena,
05:46you know, against the geopolitical backdrop, have you seen increased demand for your products?
05:51We have, yeah.
05:51Even before we launched our Firefly hyper-spectral satellites last year,
05:56which were our flagship commercial satellites,
05:59we had ended up signing, you know, about $100 million or so worth of contracts
06:04the few months before that in anticipation of the launch.
06:07And that just goes to show that a lot of customers globally in the defense and intelligence space,
06:13in the agriculture space, in the oil and gas space,
06:15they had a pent-up demand for seeing more things on planet Earth.
06:20And when we said we are providing hyperspectral data,
06:23they kind of jumped on the chance that,
06:24okay, if you're going to provide data in XYZ parameters,
06:27we will absolutely pay for it and buy it.
06:29And so we already had a large portion of the customers ready to start buying data
06:34before the satellites even went up.
06:35And that's just keeping on increasing year on year.
06:38So India, an important market for you.
06:40Where else?
06:41Where are your markets of priority?
06:42Yeah, so the United States has been a big market from day one.
06:46We work with the NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
06:50for a lot of earth science-related use cases.
06:52We had contracts with the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Organization,
06:55for a lot of intelligence-related use cases in the U.S.
06:58We work with a lot of European companies as well.
07:02We work with Australian companies like Rio Tinto for mining-related operations.
07:06So I think we have clients right now in every continent except Antarctica.
07:10And the plan is to keep on increasing the number of customers in each of those.
07:15But the biggest ones are North America and Europe,
07:17followed closely by growing India.
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