When Neha Satak and Prasad HL Bhat started tinkering with a student satellite project at the Indian Institute of Science, neither imagined it would eventually put them at the intersection of India’s telecom rollout, its rural broadband push, and its emerging satellite communications industry. Ten years on, their company Astrome Technologies has done exactly that — building millimetre-wave radios that carry 5G backhaul in Indian villages, supplying gear to the Army, Navy and BSNL, and now designing satellite bus platforms under a government mandate to build India’s small-satellite manufacturing base.
The founders and how it started
Astrome’s origin story goes back to a shared obsession with space. Neha Satak and Prasad HL Bhat met while working on a student satellite programme at IISc, where both were also pursuing their PhDs. After finishing their doctoral work, the two went their separate ways for a while — Satak moved to Texas A&M University in the US to continue researching space systems and even started her own venture working on asteroid-deflection technology, while Bhat stayed on at IISc and, in the final year of his own PhD, founded an AI-for-fashion-retail startup called Streamoid Technologies.
The two reconnected over a conversation about something distinctly un-glamorous compared to asteroids: the yawning connectivity gap between urban and rural India. That conversation became Astrome Technologies, which the duo formally founded on May 20, 2015, out of Bengaluru.
Their pitch was straightforward — if satellite TV could beam signals cheaply from space, why couldn’t the same principle make broadband internet cheap too? That thesis initially pointed the company toward building a low-earth-orbit satellite constellation for internet access, but over the years Astrome’s commercial focus has sharpened around a more immediate problem: the cost of laying last-mile telecom infrastructure across India’s terrain.
What Astrome actually builds
Astrome’s flagship product is GigaMesh, a millimetre-wave (E-band) wireless radio system designed to substitute for fibre-optic cable in places where laying fibre is expensive or impractical. GigaMesh links up with existing fibre networks to extend high-speed backhaul — the connection between mobile towers and the core network — into rural and hard-to-reach areas, enabling 5G (and eventually 6G) rollout without the capital cost of trenching cable. The company says its technology brings features like automatic link alignment and point-to-multipoint connectivity that make deployment faster and cheaper than conventional E-band systems, which have historically been limited by costly, manually aligned antennas.
The company has piloted this technology extensively within India — including deploying GigaMesh radios to deliver affordable rural broadband in Karnataka, and running a Department of Telecommunications-backed trial to provide fibre-like backhaul connectivity across 15 villages using BharatNet infrastructure. Its client list includes the Indian Army, Indian Navy, and state telecom operator BSNL, alongside system integrators and wireless equipment manufacturers.
More recently, Astrome has been extending the same underlying radio technology toward satellite communications — its stated rationale for a 2025 satcom push — while also stepping back into satellite hardware itself through a new government-backed programme (more on that below).
Funding journey
Astrome has raised close to $15 million across roughly a decade of fundraising, per data from Tracxn and CB Insights, through more than a dozen rounds and over 80 investors — a mix of institutional VCs and angels, reflecting a long, patient grind typical of Indian deeptech. An early seed round in 2018 included participation from Bengaluru-based Integra Micro Systems. In September 2021, Astrome raised $3.4 million in a bridge round co-led by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Cognizant co-founder Lakshmi Narayanan, earmarked to help the company expand into the US market.
The company closed its largest round yet in January 2025 — $10 million (roughly ₹86.35 crore) — led by New York-based alternative asset manager Apollo Global Management, with follow-on participation from IAN. Astrome said the funding would go toward scaling GigaMesh production, building next-generation communication products, and — notably — funding its entry into the satellite communications (satcom) market. For context on its financial trajectory, Astrome reported revenue of ₹8.29 crore for the fiscal year ended March 2024, up from ₹2.71 crore the year before, while narrowing its losses to ₹1.73 crore from ₹4.93 crore — a sign of a company moving toward commercial traction after years of R&D-heavy deeptech development. This remains the latest publicly verifiable financial data available for the company.
Recent traction and what’s next
2025 and early 2026 have been an unusually eventful stretch for the company. In October 2025, Astrome won the inaugural Startup World Cup – India edition at India Mobile Congress 2025 in New Delhi, beating out entries from over 300 startups to represent India at the global Startup World Cup finale in San Francisco, competing for a $1 million prize — a notable stamp of validation from the telecom and government establishment, given the competition was jointly hosted by the Department of Telecommunications and the Cellular Operators Association of India. The same year, the company marked a decade since founding and formally achieved MSME (micro, small and medium enterprise) status in India.
In a significant expansion beyond its telecom-radio roots, Astrome was selected in February 2026 as one of just three companies — alongside Hyderabad-based Azista Industries and Dhruva Space — by IN-SPACe (the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre, ISRO’s commercial-facing arm) to design and build an indigenous small-satellite bus platform. The selection came out of a pool of 15 proposals submitted in response to an April 2025 call. Each of the three companies will receive a government grant of ₹5 crore to develop a modular, scalable satellite bus capable of carrying multiple hosted payloads — effectively the “chassis” that provides a satellite’s power, communication, thermal control and navigation systems. IN-SPACe framed the programme as part of a broader push to make India a global hub for end-to-end small-satellite manufacturing, and said selected firms will get access to ISRO infrastructure and technical expertise as they build out the platform. The award marks Astrome’s evolution from a components and radio supplier into a systems integrator with an actual satellite platform to its name.
Astrome has also signed collaboration agreements with global players as it looks to sell its E-band technology beyond India, including a 2023 MoU with satellite-communications firm SatixFy (part of MDA Space) to co-develop terrestrial backhauling products around GigaMesh 2.0.
Why it matters
Astrome sits at a fairly unusual crossroads for an Indian startup: it’s simultaneously a telecom infrastructure company solving a very domestic problem — the cost of connecting rural India to 5G — and, increasingly, a space-tech company building satellite hardware as India’s private space sector opens up under IN-SPACe’s push for indigenous capability. Its Apollo Global-led raise gave it the kind of institutional, global private-equity backing that’s still relatively rare for early-stage Indian deeptech, and its IN-SPACe satellite-bus contract puts it in the same conversation as Dhruva Space and Azista Industries — both considerably more satellite-hardware-native companies — as India tries to build out a full-stack, homegrown small-satellite manufacturing ecosystem.
Whether GigaMesh’s rural-5G backhaul business and its new satellite-bus ambitions end up reinforcing each other, or Astrome eventually has to choose a lane, will be worth watching as the company enters its second decade.