When a satellite runs out of fuel or breaks down hundreds of kilometres up, hurtling along at 27,000 km/h, there is usually nothing to be done. A multi-million-dollar machine becomes junk, and often dangerous junk, adding to the debris already crowding Earth’s orbit. InspeCity, a Thane-based spacetech startup, wants to be the crew that shows up to refuel, repair, or safely tow that satellite away. It has just raised Rs 100 crore, about $10.5 million, in a pre-Series A round to try.
The problem it is chasing is real and getting worse. As thousands of new satellites launch, orbit is filling with defunct hardware and fragments that threaten working infrastructure with collisions. Rather than keep launching replacements and adding to the clutter, InspeCity’s pitch is to extend the life of what is already up there, part of an emerging field known as in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing. The round was led by its long-standing backers Speciale Invest and the investor Ashish Kacholia, and takes the company’s total equity funding to roughly $18 million since 2023.
A serious team and a rare full stack
There is a lot to like about the setup. InspeCity was founded in 2022 by Arindrajit Chowdhury, an IIT Bombay professor, and Tausif Shaikh, an IIT Bombay alumnus, and it has built its core technology in-house: green propulsion, AI-guided sensing, a dexterous robotic arm, and the docking and refuelling systems that let one spacecraft grab hold of another. Building that entire stack yourself, cheaply, is remarkably rare, and it is a big part of why investors keep coming back. The company has also lined up international partnerships, including a tie-up with Japan’s Orbital Lasers to zap debris from a safe distance.
Just as encouraging is the founder’s restraint. Chowdhury has said he is in no rush to raise a Series A and would rather wait for what he calls proof points. In a sector prone to grand promises, a deeptech CEO who wants to earn the next round with results is a good sign.
The part that is truly hard
Now the sobering reality. For all its progress, InspeCity has never flown anything. Everything so far is laboratory and prototype work, and this money is precisely about crossing the brutal gap between a device that works on a bench and one that works in space. The plan is four in-orbit missions in the next 12 to 18 months, each testing harder capabilities than the last, from inspection to robotic manipulation to cooperative docking.
That timeline is where the risk lives. Space hardware is unforgiving in a way most technology is not: it either works in orbit or it does not, with no partial credit and no way to patch a failure after launch. Four flights in eighteen months, from a company that has yet to reach orbit once, is a daring schedule. Add formidable global rivals like Japan’s publicly listed Astroscale and America’s Northrop Grumman, and the climb is steep.
So has InspeCity built the future of keeping orbit clean and satellites alive, or is it still a promising lab that has to prove itself in the harshest testing ground there is? In truth, both are true at once. The ambition is worthy, the team is credible, and the problem badly needs solving. But space keeps no secrets and grants no do-overs. The next eighteen months, not the last funding round, will tell us what InspeCity really is.
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