Isro's NavIC isn't alone. Indian startups are building eyes and ears in space
At the 2026 India Space Congress, private Indian firms unveiled satellites to observe the Earth, intercept signals and provide navigation that does not depend on foreign systems. Some of these startups say they want to strengthen Isro's NavIC, not replace it.
On a black banner at a five-star hotel in New Delhi, three of India's most sensitive frontiers were on display for anyone walking past. The Galwan Valley in Ladakh, where Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed in 2020. Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. Sir Creek, the disputed marshland between India and Pakistan.
The satellite images were not pinned up in a defence ministry war room. They were printed on the sales banner of a private space company.
That banner is a small clue to a large shift. The work of watching India's borders, listening to its adversaries, and helping its aircraft and missiles know exactly where they are, work that once sat almost entirely inside the government and the armed forces, is now being built by private space firms.
At the India Space Congress in New Delhi this week, conducted by the Satcom Industry Association – India (SIA-India), these firms were quietly offering India a fresh set of eyes, ears and a brain in orbit.
The thread running through their stalls was self-reliance. India still leans heavily on signals owned by other countries to see, to listen, and above all to know where it is and what the time is.
A cluster of Indian companies now wants to change that, not by tearing down what India already has, but by adding to it.
THE BORDER ON A SALES BANNER
The banner belonged to Ananth Technologies, a Hyderabad firm that began in 1992 and has since contributed to 109 satellites and 89 launch vehicles, according to its own figures.
Its founder, Dr Subba Rao Pavuluri, is chairman and managing director of the company and also president of SIA-India.
What Ananth was advertising was a plan for a layered fleet of watching satellites.
Some would carry ordinary cameras. Some would carry synthetic aperture radar, or SAR, a kind of radar that builds a picture from radio waves and can therefore see through cloud and in complete darkness, unlike a camera.
Others would carry hyperspectral sensors, which split light into hundreds of fine colour bands, far more than the human eye can see, so that a trained system can tell healthy crops from sick ones, or disturbed earth from undisturbed.
Together, Ananth says, such a fleet could photograph a spot on the ground at a sharpness of about 0.3 metres and revisit it as often as every two hours.
"We are coming up with a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit for surveillance, intelligence gathering and reconnaissance," Dr Pavuluri told IndiaToday.in, describing the work as strategic.
He was not the only one offering eyes. Dr Sudheer Kumar N, vice president for global strategy and manufacturing at Hyderabad-based aerospace firm XDLINX Space Labs, and a former scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), described satellites that can be reprogrammed after launch.
The trick is software-defined radio, where the satellite's behaviour is written in software rather than fixed in hardware.
"If you hard-code a satellite and send it to space, then after a year or two, if you want to change the mission, it is not possible," he told IndiaToday.in.
His satellites also do edge computing, meaning they filter their own images in orbit and beam down only the useful frames, instead of dumping huge files of empty ocean to the ground.
THE SATELLITES THAT CAN HEAR
If imaging satellites are eyes, the next idea on show was a set of ears.
ULOOK, a Bengaluru startup whose name comes from the Sanskrit word for owl, is building satellites that do not photograph the ground at all. They listen to it.
"We are building satellites that can hear," Siddhesh Naik, chief executive officer of ULOOK, told IndiaToday.in.
The technical name is electronic intelligence, or ELINT, the business of picking up the radio signals that ships, radars and radios constantly give off.
ULOOK's satellites are designed to detect such a signal, work out where on Earth it came from, and then fingerprint it, because every transmitter has tiny quirks that make its signal as individual as a human fingerprint.
The value, Naik explained, is that you cannot hide simply by switching off your identification beacon.
"Whether you want it or not, if you are emitting, you will get tracked," he said.
He pointed to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, when the attackers came in by sea while staying in radio contact with their handlers.
A satellite that can locate a stray handheld transmission in the ocean, he argued, is exactly the kind of capability India has had to buy from foreign providers.
The same instinct showed up elsewhere.
XDLINX makes a signal-intelligence payload of its own, and Ananth's surveillance plan included a layer for monitoring radio emissions across a wideband of frequencies, from 100 megahertz to 8 gigahertz.
India, in short, wants to listen from space, not only look.
THE SIGNALS INDIA DOES NOT OWN
The eyes and the ears, though, depend on something quieter and more fundamental: knowing precisely where you are and exactly what time it is.
This is the brain of the whole system, and it is where India is most dependent on others.
Almost every map, phone, power grid and stock exchange in the country quietly relies on the Global Positioning System, or GPS, a constellation of satellites owned and operated by the United States.
GPS has a weakness. Its signals are very faint by the time they reach the ground, which makes them easy to attack: they can be jammed, where an attacker floods the area with radio noise, so a receiver hears only static and cannot find its position, or spoofed, where the attacker broadcasts a convincing fake that tricks the receiver into thinking it is somewhere it is not.
A whole region's GPS can also simply be switched off by the country that controls it, and these tricks have become common in recent conflicts. A navigation signal that someone else controls is a navigation signal that can, in theory, be taken away.
India built its own answer years ago. It is called NavIC, short for Navigation with Indian Constellation, and it gives the country a positioning system of its own across the subcontinent and the surrounding seas, vital for everything from fishermen to disaster management to the armed forces.
Building it has been demanding. Satellite navigation works by timing, to within billionths of a second, how long a signal takes to travel from a satellite to your receiver, which means every satellite must carry an atomic clock, an extraordinarily precise timekeeper that uses the steady vibrations of atoms to mark time.
Atomic clocks are notoriously unforgiving in space, and NavIC has had to work through early problems with them, a reminder of how hard sovereign navigation is to build and keep running.
This is the gap the startups want to fill, and almost all of them were careful to say they are not trying to replace NavIC.
Their pitch is reinforcement: more accuracy, more resilience, more backup, so that India is never left without a signal it controls.
Lieutenant General P.J.S. Pannu (Retired), senior advisor to SIA-India and co-founder of the Space Club of India, who helped raise India's Defence Space Agency, was blunt about why this matters.
"To fight a war, you need to have your own sovereign positioning, navigation and timing. That is why NavIC is extremely important," he told IndiaToday.in.
Space, he added, is a dual-use domain, where the same satellite that guides a fishing boat can guide a missile.
A SMALLER CLOCK IN A LOWER ORBIT
One startup, VyomIC, is proposing to add a fresh layer that sits close to Earth rather than far away in the sky.
GPS and NavIC satellites orbit thousands of kilometres up. VyomIC's plan is a large constellation in low Earth orbit, only a few hundred kilometres high.
The closer a satellite is, the stronger its signal arrives at the ground, and a stronger signal is both more accurate and far harder to jam or spoof.
"LEO satellites orbit much closer to Earth, resulting in significantly stronger signals at the receiver," Lokesh Kabdal, co-founder and CEO of VyomIC, a Bengaluru-based aerospace company, told IndiaToday.in.
The signals, he added, are also encrypted, so they are harder to fake.
The heart of the system is, again, the clock.
"Traditional atomic clocks, such as caesium and rubidium clocks, provide exceptional timing accuracy, but they are often too large, heavy, power-hungry and expensive to deploy at scale," Lokesh said.
VyomIC says it is building its own compact atomic clock that matches their stability while being far smaller and cheaper to fly, important when you plan to launch more than 200 satellites.
The company is filing several patents around this miniature timing technology.
VyomIC's targets are exact: positioning accurate to within five centimetres, and time accurate to within five billionths of a second.
Its satellites would talk to one another through inter-satellite links, passing timing and position between themselves, so the whole network stays in step, and would be replaced roughly every five years, far more often than the decade or more that traditional navigation satellites stay in orbit, so the technology never goes stale.
Lokesh was emphatic that this is meant to sit alongside India's existing system. "VyomIC is being built as an independent system, and is also designed to work seamlessly alongside existing systems such as NavIC, adding another layer of accuracy, resilience and redundancy," he said.
A ground demonstration is planned for October 2026, with the first two satellites due in orbit in 2027.
VyomIC's first customers, Lokesh said, are likely to be in defence, where jamming and spoofing are growing threats, followed by autonomous machines such as drones and self-driving vehicles, and timing-hungry industries such as telecom networks, power grids, financial markets and data centres, all of which silently depend on precise time.
THE MAP THAT DRAWS ITSELF
There is a moment in every conflict when the satellites go quiet.
Not because they fail. Because someone makes them fail.
Think of a blindfolded person walking through a familiar house. Despite having no GPS and being unable to see, they know they started at the front door, took seven steps forward, turned left, and walked four more. They still know exactly where they are. That is inertial navigation.
Ananth built this by designing two sensors entirely in India. Accelerometers, which feel changes in speed. And fibre-optic gyroscopes, which use loops of light to detect every turn.
The company has already integrated these into India's fighter jets, naval aircraft like the MiG-29K and P-8i, and more than 30 indigenous missiles.
These sensors are packaged into a unit that sits inside anything that moves and cannot afford to lose its way.
When they drift, AI corrects them.
This is where everything in this story connects.
The imaging satellites are the eyes. The ELINT satellites are the ears. But without knowing exactly where you are standing, neither is useful.
And it matters far beyond warfare. When floods hit Assam and GPS fails, disaster drones still need to navigate. When a fisherman's phone signal dies in the Arabian Sea, his boat still needs to find its way home. When an ambulance must route through a jammed city network, this system still works.
Ananth builds all of it in India. That is not a tagline, but the entire point.
THE PARTS, THE POLICY AND THE STAKES
None of this works without precise components, and several companies at the Congress were quietly supplying them.
Siddhi Engineers, an Ahmedabad firm founded in 1988, makes precision aluminium parts, including waveguides, the carefully shaped metal tubes that carry microwave signals inside a satellite.
"Whatever we develop in India should be an import substitute. First you serve the Indian market, do better than the imports, then you go global," Suresh Shah, who heads marketing and exports at Siddhi Engineers, told IndiaToday.in.
The firm is now moving from ground equipment into space and strategic applications.
The Centre for Excellence (CoE) SpaceTech Foundation, a Karnataka government-backed body, is trying to connect inventors with manufacturers. "We would like to be a good bridge between innovation and industry," its director, Govindrajan D.S., told IndiaToday.in.
Holding the ecosystem together is SIA-India itself.
Its director general, Anil Prakash, said the number of Indian space startups has grown to around 400, the largest pool in the Asia-Pacific region, and that only four countries, India, Russia, the United States and China, have the full range of space capability.
But he flagged a gap. "We have a space policy, but we do not have a space act," Anil Prakash told IndiaToday.in, arguing that India needs a proper law to let the industry grow with confidence.
That is the quiet bargain on display in New Delhi. Eyes to watch the border, ears to hear across it, and a brain that knows where everything is even when the usual signals waver, increasingly built by private Indian hands rather than bought from abroad.
The stakes are not only military. The same precise timing that guides a missile also keeps a power grid stable, a stock exchange honest and a fishing boat on course.
For Lieutenant General Pannu, the direction of travel is clear enough. The future of conflict, he said, will be decided in space.
The question India is now beginning to answer, on banners in hotel ballrooms and in the plans of young companies, is how much of that space it intends to build for itself.
On a black banner at a five-star hotel in New Delhi, three of India's most sensitive frontiers were on display for anyone walking past. The Galwan Valley in Ladakh, where Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed in 2020. Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. Sir Creek, the disputed marshland between India and Pakistan.
The satellite images were not pinned up in a defence ministry war room. They were printed on the sales banner of a private space company.
That banner is a small clue to a large shift. The work of watching India's borders, listening to its adversaries, and helping its aircraft and missiles know exactly where they are, work that once sat almost entirely inside the government and the armed forces, is now being built by private space firms.
At the India Space Congress in New Delhi this week, conducted by the Satcom Industry Association – India (SIA-India), these firms were quietly offering India a fresh set of eyes, ears and a brain in orbit.
The thread running through their stalls was self-reliance. India still leans heavily on signals owned by other countries to see, to listen, and above all to know where it is and what the time is.
A cluster of Indian companies now wants to change that, not by tearing down what India already has, but by adding to it.
THE BORDER ON A SALES BANNER
The banner belonged to Ananth Technologies, a Hyderabad firm that began in 1992 and has since contributed to 109 satellites and 89 launch vehicles, according to its own figures.
Its founder, Dr Subba Rao Pavuluri, is chairman and managing director of the company and also president of SIA-India.
What Ananth was advertising was a plan for a layered fleet of watching satellites.
Some would carry ordinary cameras. Some would carry synthetic aperture radar, or SAR, a kind of radar that builds a picture from radio waves and can therefore see through cloud and in complete darkness, unlike a camera.
Others would carry hyperspectral sensors, which split light into hundreds of fine colour bands, far more than the human eye can see, so that a trained system can tell healthy crops from sick ones, or disturbed earth from undisturbed.
Together, Ananth says, such a fleet could photograph a spot on the ground at a sharpness of about 0.3 metres and revisit it as often as every two hours.
"We are coming up with a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit for surveillance, intelligence gathering and reconnaissance," Dr Pavuluri told IndiaToday.in, describing the work as strategic.
He was not the only one offering eyes. Dr Sudheer Kumar N, vice president for global strategy and manufacturing at Hyderabad-based aerospace firm XDLINX Space Labs, and a former scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), described satellites that can be reprogrammed after launch.
The trick is software-defined radio, where the satellite's behaviour is written in software rather than fixed in hardware.
"If you hard-code a satellite and send it to space, then after a year or two, if you want to change the mission, it is not possible," he told IndiaToday.in.
His satellites also do edge computing, meaning they filter their own images in orbit and beam down only the useful frames, instead of dumping huge files of empty ocean to the ground.
THE SATELLITES THAT CAN HEAR
If imaging satellites are eyes, the next idea on show was a set of ears.
ULOOK, a Bengaluru startup whose name comes from the Sanskrit word for owl, is building satellites that do not photograph the ground at all. They listen to it.
"We are building satellites that can hear," Siddhesh Naik, chief executive officer of ULOOK, told IndiaToday.in.
The technical name is electronic intelligence, or ELINT, the business of picking up the radio signals that ships, radars and radios constantly give off.
ULOOK's satellites are designed to detect such a signal, work out where on Earth it came from, and then fingerprint it, because every transmitter has tiny quirks that make its signal as individual as a human fingerprint.
The value, Naik explained, is that you cannot hide simply by switching off your identification beacon.
"Whether you want it or not, if you are emitting, you will get tracked," he said.
He pointed to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, when the attackers came in by sea while staying in radio contact with their handlers.
A satellite that can locate a stray handheld transmission in the ocean, he argued, is exactly the kind of capability India has had to buy from foreign providers.
The same instinct showed up elsewhere.
XDLINX makes a signal-intelligence payload of its own, and Ananth's surveillance plan included a layer for monitoring radio emissions across a wideband of frequencies, from 100 megahertz to 8 gigahertz.
India, in short, wants to listen from space, not only look.
THE SIGNALS INDIA DOES NOT OWN
The eyes and the ears, though, depend on something quieter and more fundamental: knowing precisely where you are and exactly what time it is.
This is the brain of the whole system, and it is where India is most dependent on others.
Almost every map, phone, power grid and stock exchange in the country quietly relies on the Global Positioning System, or GPS, a constellation of satellites owned and operated by the United States.
GPS has a weakness. Its signals are very faint by the time they reach the ground, which makes them easy to attack: they can be jammed, where an attacker floods the area with radio noise, so a receiver hears only static and cannot find its position, or spoofed, where the attacker broadcasts a convincing fake that tricks the receiver into thinking it is somewhere it is not.
A whole region's GPS can also simply be switched off by the country that controls it, and these tricks have become common in recent conflicts. A navigation signal that someone else controls is a navigation signal that can, in theory, be taken away.
India built its own answer years ago. It is called NavIC, short for Navigation with Indian Constellation, and it gives the country a positioning system of its own across the subcontinent and the surrounding seas, vital for everything from fishermen to disaster management to the armed forces.
Building it has been demanding. Satellite navigation works by timing, to within billionths of a second, how long a signal takes to travel from a satellite to your receiver, which means every satellite must carry an atomic clock, an extraordinarily precise timekeeper that uses the steady vibrations of atoms to mark time.
Atomic clocks are notoriously unforgiving in space, and NavIC has had to work through early problems with them, a reminder of how hard sovereign navigation is to build and keep running.
This is the gap the startups want to fill, and almost all of them were careful to say they are not trying to replace NavIC.
Their pitch is reinforcement: more accuracy, more resilience, more backup, so that India is never left without a signal it controls.
Lieutenant General P.J.S. Pannu (Retired), senior advisor to SIA-India and co-founder of the Space Club of India, who helped raise India's Defence Space Agency, was blunt about why this matters.
"To fight a war, you need to have your own sovereign positioning, navigation and timing. That is why NavIC is extremely important," he told IndiaToday.in.
Space, he added, is a dual-use domain, where the same satellite that guides a fishing boat can guide a missile.
A SMALLER CLOCK IN A LOWER ORBIT
One startup, VyomIC, is proposing to add a fresh layer that sits close to Earth rather than far away in the sky.
GPS and NavIC satellites orbit thousands of kilometres up. VyomIC's plan is a large constellation in low Earth orbit, only a few hundred kilometres high.
The closer a satellite is, the stronger its signal arrives at the ground, and a stronger signal is both more accurate and far harder to jam or spoof.
"LEO satellites orbit much closer to Earth, resulting in significantly stronger signals at the receiver," Lokesh Kabdal, co-founder and CEO of VyomIC, a Bengaluru-based aerospace company, told IndiaToday.in.
The signals, he added, are also encrypted, so they are harder to fake.
The heart of the system is, again, the clock.
"Traditional atomic clocks, such as caesium and rubidium clocks, provide exceptional timing accuracy, but they are often too large, heavy, power-hungry and expensive to deploy at scale," Lokesh said.
VyomIC says it is building its own compact atomic clock that matches their stability while being far smaller and cheaper to fly, important when you plan to launch more than 200 satellites.
The company is filing several patents around this miniature timing technology.
VyomIC's targets are exact: positioning accurate to within five centimetres, and time accurate to within five billionths of a second.
Its satellites would talk to one another through inter-satellite links, passing timing and position between themselves, so the whole network stays in step, and would be replaced roughly every five years, far more often than the decade or more that traditional navigation satellites stay in orbit, so the technology never goes stale.
Lokesh was emphatic that this is meant to sit alongside India's existing system. "VyomIC is being built as an independent system, and is also designed to work seamlessly alongside existing systems such as NavIC, adding another layer of accuracy, resilience and redundancy," he said.
A ground demonstration is planned for October 2026, with the first two satellites due in orbit in 2027.
VyomIC's first customers, Lokesh said, are likely to be in defence, where jamming and spoofing are growing threats, followed by autonomous machines such as drones and self-driving vehicles, and timing-hungry industries such as telecom networks, power grids, financial markets and data centres, all of which silently depend on precise time.
THE MAP THAT DRAWS ITSELF
There is a moment in every conflict when the satellites go quiet.
Not because they fail. Because someone makes them fail.
Think of a blindfolded person walking through a familiar house. Despite having no GPS and being unable to see, they know they started at the front door, took seven steps forward, turned left, and walked four more. They still know exactly where they are. That is inertial navigation.
Ananth built this by designing two sensors entirely in India. Accelerometers, which feel changes in speed. And fibre-optic gyroscopes, which use loops of light to detect every turn.
The company has already integrated these into India's fighter jets, naval aircraft like the MiG-29K and P-8i, and more than 30 indigenous missiles.
These sensors are packaged into a unit that sits inside anything that moves and cannot afford to lose its way.
When they drift, AI corrects them.
This is where everything in this story connects.
The imaging satellites are the eyes. The ELINT satellites are the ears. But without knowing exactly where you are standing, neither is useful.
And it matters far beyond warfare. When floods hit Assam and GPS fails, disaster drones still need to navigate. When a fisherman's phone signal dies in the Arabian Sea, his boat still needs to find its way home. When an ambulance must route through a jammed city network, this system still works.
Ananth builds all of it in India. That is not a tagline, but the entire point.
THE PARTS, THE POLICY AND THE STAKES
None of this works without precise components, and several companies at the Congress were quietly supplying them.
Siddhi Engineers, an Ahmedabad firm founded in 1988, makes precision aluminium parts, including waveguides, the carefully shaped metal tubes that carry microwave signals inside a satellite.
"Whatever we develop in India should be an import substitute. First you serve the Indian market, do better than the imports, then you go global," Suresh Shah, who heads marketing and exports at Siddhi Engineers, told IndiaToday.in.
The firm is now moving from ground equipment into space and strategic applications.
The Centre for Excellence (CoE) SpaceTech Foundation, a Karnataka government-backed body, is trying to connect inventors with manufacturers. "We would like to be a good bridge between innovation and industry," its director, Govindrajan D.S., told IndiaToday.in.
Holding the ecosystem together is SIA-India itself.
Its director general, Anil Prakash, said the number of Indian space startups has grown to around 400, the largest pool in the Asia-Pacific region, and that only four countries, India, Russia, the United States and China, have the full range of space capability.
But he flagged a gap. "We have a space policy, but we do not have a space act," Anil Prakash told IndiaToday.in, arguing that India needs a proper law to let the industry grow with confidence.
That is the quiet bargain on display in New Delhi. Eyes to watch the border, ears to hear across it, and a brain that knows where everything is even when the usual signals waver, increasingly built by private Indian hands rather than bought from abroad.
The stakes are not only military. The same precise timing that guides a missile also keeps a power grid stable, a stock exchange honest and a fishing boat on course.
For Lieutenant General Pannu, the direction of travel is clear enough. The future of conflict, he said, will be decided in space.
The question India is now beginning to answer, on banners in hotel ballrooms and in the plans of young companies, is how much of that space it intends to build for itself.
