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Spacetech: backing the full stack of the orbital economy
Space is no longer a single moonshot. It is becoming an economy, and economies get built in layers. You need a way to reach orbit affordably, a way to move and service things once they’re there, and somewhere to actually operate. Each layer unlocks the next, and each one is a venture-scale opportunity in its own right.
We back founders across that whole stack. Our spacetech portfolio is not a bet on one breakthrough; it is a bet that an entire value chain is being rebuilt from first principles, and that some of the best teams doing it are global, technical, and underfunded.
A stack, not a moonshot
The companies that compound in space will be the ones that own a hard, load-bearing layer of the orbital economy and get more valuable as everything around them grows. Cheaper access drives more payloads. More payloads need more propulsion, servicing, and logistics. A busier orbit creates demand for places to dock, experiment, and live. The layers reinforce each other.
That is why we don’t pick between “launch” and “what comes after.” We think the entire stack is being built at once, and we want exposure across it.
Where we’re spending time
Our spacetech investments map directly onto these layers:
- Affordable, reusable access. EtherealX is building a fully reusable medium-lift launch vehicle to bring India’s launch economy up to global cost and cadence. Reusability is the foundation everything else is priced against.
- In-space propulsion and mobility. Manastu Space builds green in-space propulsion, the capability that lets satellites maneuver, avoid collisions, and extend their useful lives once they reach orbit.
- Habitats and orbital infrastructure. AkashaLabdhi is developing expandable space habitats for orbital logistics, microgravity work, and defence, turning orbit into a place to operate rather than just pass through.
Closer to home, Cligent Aerospace brings the same first-principles approach to flight, building India’s first indigenous hybrid-electric regional aircraft. Different altitude, same instinct: rebuild a hard piece of aerospace infrastructure from the ground up.
What we look for in founders
Spacetech punishes optimism that isn’t backed by engineering. We look for teams who can hold two truths at once: a genuinely large vision for the layer they’re building, and a brutally concrete first system that survives contact with vacuum, radiation, and a launch manifest.
The best founders here tend to come from inside the hard parts, whether propulsion, structures, GNC, or flight software, and have learned to sequence an audacious roadmap into milestones a customer will actually pay for along the way.
The lens of the iceberg
As with the rest of our thesis, most of the value sits below the surface. The rocket is visible; the propulsion, habitats, and infrastructure that make the destination worth reaching are not. That is exactly where we want to be, backing the founders building the parts of the orbital economy most people never see, but everything else comes to depend on.
If you’re building in this space, we’d like to hear from you.