India knows its position in the sky only to within a few metres. The GPS signal on your phone, and even India’s own NavIC system, typically lands somewhere inside a five-metre circle — fine for getting you to the right street, but useless for landing a drone on a launch pad, steering an autonomous tractor down a row of crops, or telling a toll gantry whether a truck is on the highway, the service road, or the flyover above it. Closing that gap from metres to centimetres today requires expensive ground infrastructure — base stations every few kilometres — which is precisely why the centimetre world has stayed closed to most of India.
Sanyark Space Technologies, a deeptech venture founded by two former ISRO scientists, is trying to put that infrastructure in orbit instead. The company is building India’s first multi-mission NAV-COM satellite constellation: a software-defined low Earth orbit (LEO) network that fuses precision navigation with secure communication on the same platform — and it says its first demonstration mission, Dhrona-1, is targeting launch in the first quarter of 2027.
Why it matters: positioning, navigation and timing data is the invisible utility running beneath modern aviation, shipping, logistics, financial transactions and defence networks — and much of India’s supply comes from foreign systems. NavIC is a sovereign step, but as the company’s founders point out, its ecosystem does not yet deliver the centimetre-level precision that future mobility and autonomy will need. A jammed or spoofed signal in a contested environment could blind those systems entirely; Sanyark says its constellation is being designed from the start to stay useful when signals are attacked.
One constellation, two jobs
The core idea is integration. Navigation and communication have always been delivered by separate, dedicated satellite constellations — one set of satellites tells you where you are, another carries your messages. Sanyark’s NAV-COM system folds both into the same spacecraft: centimetre-level positioning and nanosecond-level timing, integrated with secure machine-to-machine and IoT connectivity. The company says the constellation will augment, not replace, existing GNSS systems like NavIC, and remain interoperable with them.
The technology stack is ambitious for a company barely a year old. The satellites are planned as software-defined platforms — payloads that can be reconfigured in orbit via software-defined radios — with phased-array antennas and advanced digital beamforming for electronic steering and anti-jamming, inter-satellite links to keep the mesh network resilient, and on-board edge AI to process data before it ever touches the ground. That combination, the company says, lets the system resist electronic warfare, adapt to new threats, and even stay ready for emerging standards like 6G.
Dhrona-1 and the road to 240 satellites
The first test of all this will be the Dhrona-1 mission. According to CEO Raghava Kundrapu, the mission’s goals include testing chip-scale atomic clocks from multiple vendors, validating the end-to-end performance of the communication and positioning payloads — as much as a single satellite allows — and proving interoperability with existing GNSS systems. The demonstrator is expected to be ready around January 2027, with launch targeted for the first quarter of the year.
Behind it sits a larger plan: an initial constellation of 40 satellites in low Earth orbit, covering India, South Asia and the Middle East, eventually expanding to 240 satellites for global coverage and jamming resilience. The money to start is in place — a $2 million pre-seed round led by Avaana Capital, with AUM Ventures investing $500,000 as the first investment from its India DeepSpark deeptech initiative, plus participation from SIDBI and T-Hub. The capital is earmarked for constellation design, payload development and early customer engagements across defence, infrastructure and industrial applications.
The company behind the constellation
Sanyark Space was incorporated in July 2025 by Raghava Kundrapu and Akhileshwar Reddy Peseke, both former ISRO scientists. Kundrapu, the CEO, is an aerospace engineer who spent eight years at ISRO working on more than 40 missions — including PSLV and GSLV launch vehicles — before moving to space-technology consulting at Deloitte and studying at Masters’ Union University. Peseke, the CTO, brings more than a decade of technical leadership in GNSS and NavIC systems, including work on the government’s GNSS tolling pilot project.
The founding insight, Kundrapu has said, came from Deloitte consulting work on satellite-based tolling, where the metre-level ceiling of existing navigation made it impossible to reliably tell a vehicle on a flyover from one on the road below — combined with Peseke’s first-hand experience of the same limitation at ISRO. The company was selected for YourStory’s Tech30 2026 cohort, the annual selection of 30 Indian startups building next-generation technology, unveiled by Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu at TechSparks 2026.
A constellation that does not exist yet is, by definition, a promise — and Dhrona-1 will be the first check on it. But if a two-person team of former ISRO engineers can fly a software-defined navigation-plus-comms satellite by early 2027 and chart a credible path to forty of them, India will own something it has never had: a sovereign, jam-resilient positioning layer built for the autonomous world, from Bharat, for Bharat.
