India To Emerge As The Supplier Of Choice For Spacetech, Semiconductors: Lightspeed’s Hemant Mohapatra

India To Emerge As The Supplier Of Choice For Spacetech, Semiconductors: Lightspeed’s Hemant Mohapatra

SUMMARY

As India celebrates National Space Day today, Inc42 spoke to Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed, to understand India’s space story from an investor’s lens

In the interview, Mohapatra shared Lightspeed’s investment thesis, the reasons for the success of India’s spacetech sector, and the path ahead

Mohapatra said that boosting homegrown ecosystem in sectors like semiconductor would give further impetus to spacetech sector

India has been at the forefront of research and innovation in the space sector for decades. From Dr Vikram Sarabhai leading the Indian space programme in the 1960s and the eventual establishment of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to India today gearing up for the fourth and fifth iterations of its Chandrayaan mission, the country has come a long way.As India celebrates the first-ever National Space Day today on August 23, marking the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission, Inc42 spoke to Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed India, one of the leading deeptech investors in the country, to understand India’s space story from an investors’ lens. The space sector is in the limelight because the focus now is on building and backing highly innovative, world-changing, difficult-to-build long-term businesses. So far, we have chosen to make investments from the India fund, primarily in the global and repeatable businesses. This is where Pixxel came in. India always gets to hear this a lot – this is a jugaad innovation. I don’t believe that is the right way to go for our country. World-beating innovations at lower cost are fantastic. Lower cost always means higher distribution, more satellites in space, more technology innovation, and more viability of them getting to commercial scale. Our goal should be to get to that point where we are absolutely nailing all the trust-based relationships and become the supplier vendor of choice for technology across these 3-4 domains. 

In recent times, one of the biggest shifts in the space industry was the government’s decision to open up the sector to private entities, thereby enabling spacetech startups to flourish. To facilitate private sector participation, the Centre established the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe). The Indian Space Policy 2023 gave further momentum to the spacetech sector. 

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