Infosys to invest Rs 17 crore in IIT M-incubated spacetech startup GalaxEye

Infosys on Thursday said it has agreed to invest in space-tech startup, GalaxEye Space Solutions Pvt Ltd up to Rs 17 crore (approximately $2 million) as part of Infosys Innovation Fund. The cash investment will involve Infosys picking up a minority stake, less than 20%, as part of the series A round to pick up equity and compulsory convertible preference shares.

The funding round is expected to be completed on or before September 30, 2024, Infosys said in a regulatory filing.

Bengaluru-based GalaxEye is a space-tech startup for Earth Observation that builds multi-sensor satellites and synchronization platform. GalaxEye generates comprehensive all-weather, high-resolution and intuitive datasets. The downstream applications of space technology and the datasets powered by AI and Analytics presents a potential of data-driven decisions spanning multiple industries, the statement said.


In August, GalaxEye had announced a fund raise of $6.5mn as part of the Series A funding led by venture capital (VC) funds Mela Ventures and Speciale Invest. The round also saw participation from drone manufacturer ideaForge, with additional investments from other VCs including Rainmatter, Navam Capital, Faad Capital, and Anicut Capital.

In 2022, the startup received seed capital from angel investors including Prashant Pitti - cofounders of EaseMyTrip, Abhishek Goyal – cofounder of data platform Tracxn, Nithin Kamath – founder and CEO of broking platform Zerodha and Celesta Capital partner Ganpathy Subramaniam.

Infosys Innovation Fund

SpaceTech is a frontier technology with potential to unlock significant value to businesses globally and create high impact solutions at scale, Infosys said.

Infosys Innovation Fund was launched in 2015 to invest in entrepreneurial ventures around the world. Its portfolio of investments include Trifacta, ideaForge, TidalScale, AirvizSpeck, Whoop, Stellaris Venture Partners and US-based early stage fund The House Fund. It has made exits from two investments – Waterline Data and Unsilo, as per its website.

“Infosys Innovation Fund seeks to partner with AI and DeepTech startups such as GalaxEye to complement its capabilities and jointly co-create next-generation solutions bringing the power of SpaceTech to help its clients navigate their business transformation,” Infosys statement further said.

GalaxEye

GalaxEye was founded in 2021 by a team of five alumni of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, who have previously worked together as part of Team Avishkar Hyperloop, a student competition team at IIT-M, which qualified as the only Asian Finalist at the SpaceX Hyperloop Competition 2019.

The founders include Suyash Singh, Denil Chawda, Pranit Mehta, Rakshit Bhatt and Satya Chakravarthy. According to Tracxn, Chakravarthy has founded two more companies - ePlane and Aerostrovilos.

It now has a 50-member team which works on the technology and datasets that can potentially benefit various industries such as defense, insurance, logistics, utilities, infrastructure, agriculture, disaster management and mining.