This follows Google chief government Sundar Pichai saying on the Google For India 2022 occasion final December that the corporate will make investments $300 million in homegrown startups.
With the most recent Sequence B spherical, Pixxel has raised $68.3 million in complete funding up to now, together with a $25 million Sequence A spherical in March 2022, and a $7.3 million seed around the yr earlier. Accenture, the world’s largest know-how companies firm, additionally made a strategic funding in Pixxel in August 2022, the dimensions of which wasn’t disclosed.
The scale of Google’s funding couldn’t be ascertained. Google didn’t reply to an e-mail question.
Pixxel was the primary Indian spacetech startup to lift funds from a worldwide investor when Canada’s Radical Ventures led its Sequence A spherical.
Google’s funding is the third occasion of an abroad entity investing in a homegrown house startup after Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace raised $50.5 million from Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC in September final yr.
In an interview, Awais Ahmed, co-founder and chief government of Pixxel, mentioned the most recent fundraise will give the corporate “at the least three years of runway”.
“The primary batch of our business satellites, by way of which we are going to start providing full-fledged satellite-based imagery and knowledge analytics companies to paying prospects, is within the ultimate growth levels. We anticipate to be prepared with the satellites by the tip of this yr, and conduct a launch of six of those satellites as a part of our hyperspectral imagery constellation by March subsequent yr. It will assist us start our companies formally by the primary half of subsequent yr,” he mentioned.
Ahmed mentioned Pixxel has greater than 50 business contracts with prospects from authorities our bodies, forestry, oil and gasoline, and local weather monitoring companies globally. “We anticipate to attract month-to-month recurring income from our purchasers beginning on the finish of first half of CY24, which is able to additional assist us develop our runway,” he mentioned.
Pixxel counts mining big Rio Tinto, Australian satellite tv for pc knowledge imagery and analytics agency DataFarming, Colombian geo-data options agency Procalculo, Croatian geospatial knowledge reseller Domidus and US geo-services agency Astraea amongst its prospects.
Google has been investing in Indian startups for a number of years. It made its first guess in an Indian startup in June 2014 by way of its funding arm Google Capital in homegrown IT companies startup Freshworks (then Freshdesk). Since then, it has invested in startups akin to proptech agency CommonFloor, healthtech agency Practo and GirnarSoft’s auto itemizing platform CarDekho.
The funding in Pixxel is, nonetheless, a primary for Google within the Indian spacetech sector. The corporate has notably backed Elon Musk’s SpaceX, partnering with US monetary companies agency Constancy to take a position $1 billion within the firm in January 2015.
Pixxel can be engaged on constructing its personal floor stations to seize satellite tv for pc knowledge and course of it in-house by way of an information analytics suite. It plans to supply the processed knowledge to corporations worldwide.
“It will assist us develop our scope of enterprise, since not each company or agency would have the means to set-up their very own floor stations to attract knowledge. We plan to rent engineers and software program builders to construct this knowledge analytics suite this yr and develop to 200 staff by end-2023 from 120 now,” Ahmed mentioned.
Sheetal Bahl, associate at enterprise capital agency GrowX Ventures, an current investor in Pixxel and which additionally took half within the newest spherical, mentioned Google’s function as an investor in Pixxel may transcend taking a guess on the corporate as a spacetech startup.
“For Google, that is doubtless testing waters. It has taken a variety of bets on the Indian ecosystem, however plenty of them have been smaller ones. Right here, Google is the co-lead, and it could doubtless have a look at Pixxel for its knowledge analytics platform, in addition to using its high-res satellites in excessive definition mapping,” he mentioned.
Different traders in house startups mentioned Google’s transfer could open up the sector to bigger investments.
Up to date: 01 Jun 2023, 10:03 PM IST