Spacetech Startup SatSure Receives Strategic Investment From ICICI Bank, Others

Spacetech startup SatSure has raised an undisclosed amount of strategic investment from ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, and HDFC Ltd. 

According to SatSure, the investment is a part of its INR 120 Cr Series A funding round, which the startup is winding up now.

The development comes nine months after SatSure acquired geospatial startup Old City Innovations (OCI) in a cash and stock deal. 

Set up in 2017 by Prateep Basu, Rashmit Singh Sukhmani and Abhishek Raju, SatSure offers remote sensing, machine learning and data analytics solutions to resolve issues related to agriculture, banking and financial service, and climate sectors.

The startup has three offerings: 

• SatSure Sparta– The platform provides insights on agriculture and climate sector
• SatSure SAGE – It offers risk monitoring and business intelligence suite for agriculture financial services
• SatSure SKIES – It’s a satellite-based product suite for identifying infrastructural changes

“ICICI Bank is a great believer in using technological innovations to offer improved convenience to its customers. In line with this philosophy, we have pioneered satellite data as an integral part of our tech stack to enable expeditious credit assessment of farmers in a contactless manner. This investment in SatSure further strengthens our partnership to create innovative solutions for our customers,” said Rakesh Jha, executive director of ICICI Bank.

In May last year, SatSure acquired SaaS startup CropTrails for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition would help the spacetech startup to foray in Africa, SEA And LATAM regions. 

Prior to that, the startup bagged $5 Mn in a Pre-Series A round from a slew of investors including ADB Ventures, Flowstate VC, Force Ventures, IndigoEdge Advisors, Toch.ai, Duro Capital’s Nishchay Goel, LuckBox Ventures and xto10x Technologies’ Saikiran Krishnamurthy.

“We are both happy and proud to have India’s three major private financial institutions as our investors. We will continue building an organization with a goal of creating an end-to-end EO data and analytics stack for delivering decision intelligence across multiple sectors,” said Prateep Basu, founder and CEO of SatSure.

SatSure plans to use the funding to own a fleet of four high-resolution data-producing satellites by 2024.

The startup claims to have expanded its employee base by 3X and grown revenue by 5X in the past 12 months. 

Recently, it rolled out a product in association with TransUnion CIBIL that provides crop intelligence using multi-spectral satellite imagery and machine learning.

According to an ISRO report, the country’s space tech industry is set to become a $77 Bn market by 2030. It currently accounts for 2% of the global spacetech market.

A series of developments have occurred in the spacetech industry lately. In January, tech colossal Microsoft inked MoU with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to support and mentor spacetech startups in the country. 

In December 2022, spacetech startup GalaxEye Space secured $3.5 Mn in a seed funding round led by Speciale Invest. 

Artha India Ventures, Veda VC, Anicut Capital, Upsparks, Zerodha’s Nithin Kamath, EaseMyTrip’s Prashant Pitti, Tracxn’s Abhishek Goyal and Celesta Capital’s Ganpathy Subramaniam also participated in the funding round. 

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