Image credit: Exceptional Technology — AI-generated illustrative scene for Nibiaa’s satellite IoT trackers; the company publishes no official product photograph.
Across much of India, the mobile network simply ends. In the tea gardens of the Northeast, on remote highways, in border districts and far out at sea, a shipment can vanish from every map the moment it leaves the last tower behind. In Imphal, a startup called Nibiaa looked at all that invisible territory and decided it should be trackable too — not with more towers, but with satellites.
Nibiaa Devices was founded in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, by Aeroshil Nameirakpam and N. Irabanta Singh — a technologist and an agricultural researcher with more than forty years in the field — with Sushil Laishram joining later from the United States as a co-founder. Their starting point was close to home: the tea gardens of Northeast India, where Professor Singh had spent a career watching research findings sit unread while farmers worked without data. Nibiaa’s first field trials put LoRaWAN environmental sensors into three tea estates, turning soil, weather and crop readings into decisions a grower could actually use — and into the carbon accounting that could one day earn a garden credits for what it grows.
One device family, five jobs
From that beginning grew NibiaaTrack, a family of five tracking devices built for the shipments the mobile network cannot see. Cryo watches ultra-cold pharmaceutical consignments down to -196°C, keeping audit-ready records for vaccines and biologics. Pro stays always on for reusable high-value assets. Lite is a disposable, low-cost tracker for high-volume shipments. Seal gives tamper evidence for chain of custody, and Tag turns packaging itself into an anti-counterfeit check. Behind them sits NibiaaNet, the company’s network server, which the company says already integrates with about half of the world’s satellite constellations and is working toward near-total coverage — so a customer plugs into one API instead of negotiating with a dozen satellite operators.
The trick is hybrid connectivity. A Nibiaa device does not bet on a single network: it moves between low-Earth-orbit and geostationary satellites, LoRa, NB-IoT and CAT-M, whichever link is available where the shipment happens to be. The company says that combination now keeps assets visible across nine countries, from high-value equipment tracked for a Singapore client to water-treatment plants monitored for the Andaman Public Works Department, from restroom occupancy at Dubai Mall to chiller and freezer monitoring in Ghana, and from medical equipment tracking in American hospitals to workforce monitoring for a demolition company in the United States.
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A live satellite link, tested in America
The idea proved itself in stages. In 2021, Nibiaa helped build out the Helium LoRaWAN network in India, selling more than 70 SenseCAP gateways in its first year. In 2026, the team took the next step and established a live non-terrestrial network connection in the United States, using a Nordic Semiconductor development kit and the Skylo satellite network — a real-world test that data can travel from a device to a satellite and back with no tower in between. The company’s satellite partners now include Lacuna Space, Kinéis, Skylo, Myriota and Sateliot.
October 2026 brought the recognition home. Selected by Telecom Centres of Excellence India on behalf of the Department of Telecommunications, Nibiaa showcased its technology in the non-terrestrial networks category at India Mobile Congress 2026 in New Delhi — and walked away with the ASPIRE NextGen Startup Innovation Award 2026. At the same event, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with Sanyark Space, the Hyderabad company founded by former ISRO scientists, to develop next-generation ground trackers and receivers for a planned low-Earth-orbit NAV-COM satellite constellation, which aims to pair centimetre-level positioning with secure 5G non-terrestrial connectivity alongside India’s NavIC system.
Deep tech from the Northeast
For its founder, the award is proof of something larger than one company. Aeroshil Nameirakpam describes it as validation that deep tech can be built in Imphal, Dimapur, Agartala and Itanagar — cities far from India’s startup capitals, but close to the farms, borders and hills where connectivity matters most. Connecting a farm in Manipur to a satellite overhead, he says, is what Atmanirbhar Bharat looks like in practice.
That is the thread running through everything Nibiaa builds: the places the network forgot are exactly the places worth connecting. A tea garden that can prove its carbon numbers, a vaccine shipment that never goes dark in transit, a border outpost whose supplies are always on the map — each one is a small patch of the world made visible again, by a device that talks to the sky.
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