From a Garage to the Galaxy: Skyroot's Pawan Chandana on Rockets, Risk, and India's Space Revolution

There are founders who build companies. And then there are founders who build industries.Pawan Chandana belongs to the second kind.The co-founder of Skyroot Aerospace, India's first deep tech unicorn in the space sector — sat down with What Next for the show's debut episode, and what followed was one of the most candid, compelling conversations about ambition, survival, and the audacity to aim at the stars. Literally.The Rocket is Already at the LaunchpadThe conversation opens with a headline that would stop most people mid-scroll."When we started off, we didn't know what... if you see, all the odds of success were very low, because there was no policy, there was no funding environment in India when we started the company in 2018. There was no talent

in the private sector to build hard tech really, deep tech, hard tech. People think that rocket science is rocket science — so difficult that startups may not be able to do it. Maybe US billionaires will do it. That was the thought process.

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But we have launched India's first private rocket to space. We are just about to launch India's first private orbital rocket. It's already at the launch site, and it's going to take off in a few weeks now. I think really India has enabled us to do it — the ecosystem, the people, the government, the policies have opened up. A lot of things happened in the last seven years which enabled us to do our journey."Let that land for a moment. A startup founded in 2018, with no policy framework, no funding ecosystem, and no private sector talent pipeline, is weeks away from putting India's first privately-built orbital rocket into space. In a nation where rocket science was long considered the exclusive domain of governments, and specifically ISRO, this is not just a business milestone. It is a civilisational one.Skyroot's valuation crossed the billion-dollar mark, making it one of India's 120 unicorns. More significantly, it is the first deep tech, hard tech unicorn to emerge from the space sector, a category where the failure rate isn't just high, it's explosive. Quite literally.

Not SpaceX. Something Smarter

The inevitable comparison to Elon Musk's SpaceX comes up, as it always does when rockets are involved. Chandana doesn't deflect it, he reframes it entirely."SpaceX is more like a train to go to space and we are more like a cab to go to space. SpaceX is a big rocket, you collate all the customers together and put them into regular orbits, which most people want to go to. They launch multiple satellites together into common orbits. What we do is we are like a cab. If you want to go to a specific location in space, instead of booking a train, you book a cab. Like, if you want to go to your friend's place, you book a cab, you don't book a train."The host offers a punchier version of the same idea. "So you are like the Uber Black of space?"Chandana doesn't miss a beat."Yes, we are like the Uber to go to space. Uber Black of space. Yes, correct."It is the kind of line that captures a business model, a brand identity, and a market gap in seven words. Skyroot isn't chasing SpaceX. It is building something the market didn't know it needed — and backing it up with investors that include BlackRock, Temasek, and GIC. The holy grail of global capital is already on board.

27. Single. Married To The Venture

The story of how Skyroot was born is not the story of a calculated entrepreneur executing a business plan. It is the story of a man who felt a lightning strike and jumped.Chandana spent six years at ISRO — at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, no less — and by his own admission, was so deeply in love with the work that he had imagined retiring there. Then something shifted. The entrepreneurial ambition he had carried since school, the love of rockets, and the realisation that India's private space sector was a blank canvas all converged at once."I was ready for all risks, risking everything. I was ready to risk anything — even if I don't risk capital, I'll survive with whatever savings I have. I thought, policy may take 10 years, I'll wait for 10 years, we'll do something. So I was all in."And then came the moment that defines the Skyroot origin story."I was not married when I started. I was 27 years old. So, parents — what it is, I resigned my job and then told my parents. I'd been telling them I want to start a company, but they didn't take it much seriously. But then once I quit my job, then I told them."The sequence of events is important. He quit first. Informed them after.His parents — particularly his father, himself a former entrepreneur turned government employee — were not angry. They were shocked. Their concern was not about money or failure in the abstract. It was about health. About stress. About watching a child who had cleared one of the world's most competitive entrance exams, earned a government job at India's most respected scientific institution, and then walked away from all of it.But Chandana had already done the calculus. He was prepared to wait a decade for policy to catch up. Prepared to outlast the funding drought. Prepared for the worst. "Everything was better than what I had prepared for," he says — except for one period that nearly broke everything.A set of early-bet investors came in at precisely the right moment. Existing backers extended loans to bridge the gap until the Series A closed. And then, in what Chandana describes as a strangely timed move, Skyroot raised the largest deep tech funding round in India's history two months before the launch of Vikram-S, their first rocket, in November 2022.Most investors would have waited for the proof point. These ones didn't. "The best investors are the people who take early bets," Chandana says simply.The launch succeeded. The rest, as they say, is now orbit.

The Larger Dream

Zoom out from the funding rounds and the launch windows, and Chandana's vision is something much bigger than a balance sheet."The dream is to make spaceflight as regular as air flight. Today we are nothing close to that. Just imagine sitting on a rocket and safely traveling to space. Definitely realistic — absolutely. It will just take time for iteration, time for more and more polishing. But it is within physics to beat Earth's gravity. And then on a regular basis, break what you call the chains of gravity and become a space-faring civilisation in a very big way. This is definitely going to happen in the next two decades."He speaks about billions of people getting connected to high-speed internet via satellite constellations. About solar energy harvested in space — where the sun shines 24 hours a day, powering AI compute on Earth. About continuous earth observation satellites transforming agriculture, fisheries, urban planning, and disaster management.He invokes the Wright Brothers, who flew in 1903. Today, hundreds of thousands of flights take off every single day. The first satellite launched in 1957. Space, as an industry, is barely 70 years old.Space, in Chandana's telling, is not a luxury for the few. It is already infrastructure for the many — and it is only going to deepen.

What Next

The orbital rocket is on the pad. Commercial revenues are set to begin this year. The global market is watching.India, which once sent a mission to Mars for less than the budget of the film The Martian, has now produced a private company capable of competing on the world stage for orbital launches.Pawan Chandana resigned his government job at 27, told his parents after, survived COVID with months of runway left, and is now weeks away from making history.The Uber Black of space is cleared for takeoff.