Picture a bank officer in Mumbai deciding whether a farmer in Vidarbha can repay a crop loan, or a district official watching floodwater creep toward a village in Assam. Both of them need the same thing: to know what is really happening on the ground, right now, across thousands of square kilometres. A Bengaluru startup has spent nine years building the eyes to do exactly that — from space. SatSure turns satellite imagery into decisions, and now it is building Dhaarini, a homegrown AI model that reads the Indian landscape the way no global model can.
SatSure was founded in 2017 by Prateep Basu, Rashmit Singh Sukhmani and Abhishek Raju, alumni of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology and ISRO. Their idea was simple and ambitious: satellites already photograph every inch of India, every few days, but that raw imagery is useless to a bank, an insurer or a government department until someone turns it into answers. SatSure built the layer that does the turning — combining satellite data, remote sensing, artificial intelligence and big-data analytics into decision-intelligence platforms for banking, agriculture, infrastructure and climate.
Three products, one view of the living Earth
The company calls its mission building the “digital dictionary of the living Earth”, and its product family covers the whole journey from pixel to decision. SatSure Sparta tracks agriculture and climate — crop health through the season, yield estimates, and damage assessment after a flood or a dry spell, all from orbit. SatSure Sage is built for lenders: it monitors farm loans through their full life cycle, giving banks farm-level insight for underwriting, portfolio monitoring and collections, so credit can reach small farmers faster and on fairer terms. SatSure Skies watches infrastructure from above, detecting change along roads, pipelines and power corridors before a small problem becomes a big one.
A SatSure satellite imaging Earth from orbit. Image: SatSure.
That work has found real customers. SatSure counts dozens of enterprise clients across eight countries, and its backers read like a roll call of Indian finance — ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and HDFC Ltd joined as strategic investors as the company closed a Rs 120-crore Series A, and a 2024 round was co-led by Baring Private Equity Partners (India) and Promus Ventures with TransUnion participating. SatSure even built a joint product with TransUnion CIBIL, pairing the bureau’s credit data with crop intelligence from multispectral satellite imagery.
From buying pictures to flying its own cameras
For years SatSure bought its imagery from other people’s satellites. Its wholly owned subsidiary KaleidEO is changing that, building high-resolution optical and multispectral payloads in-house. In April 2024 the team aerial-tested its payload over the UK and Austria, capturing images in five spectral bands at 16-centimetre resolution from an aircraft — a milestone that, the company says, made SatSure a full-stack Earth observation company. The satellite version of the payload is designed to capture images at one-metre resolution across a 65-kilometre swath, and KaleidEO is working toward a four-satellite fleet flying in very low Earth orbit at 380 kilometres. The company also says it was the first Indian firm to demonstrate edge computing in space, processing imagery on board the satellite itself.
More Read
The ambition grew bigger still in August 2025, when SatSure joined a Rs 1,200-crore IN-SPACe consortium — led by Pixxel Space, with PierSight and Dhruva Space — to build India’s first fully private Earth observation constellation: twelve multi-sensor satellites over the next three to five years, carrying panchromatic, multispectral, hyperspectral and radar payloads. SatSure will contribute two satellites carrying its KaleidEO imager, bringing its own eyes to a sovereign Indian constellation.
Dhaarini: an AI model that understands India
The newest chapter is Dhaarini, a Large Earth Observation Model that SatSure is building with support from IN-SPACe. On 11 June 2026, IN-SPACe selected SatSure as one of the first recipients of its Rs 500-crore Technology Adoption Fund, backing Dhaarini as India’s foundational AI platform for remote sensing — a grant of about Rs 24.6 crore, reported the Economic Times. Where global models are trained mostly on other continents’ landscapes, Dhaarini is being trained on satellite and drone data tuned to Indian conditions: monsoon patterns, Indian agricultural landscapes and fast-growing cities. The model is designed to generate insights across agriculture, infrastructure and disaster management, so the same intelligence can serve a farmer, a bank and a disaster-response team.
“Earth observation is moving from project-specific analytics to reusable intelligence infrastructure,” co-founder and chief technology officer Rashmit Singh Sukhmani said when the grant was announced — and that is exactly what Dhaarini is: infrastructure, not a one-off project.
Why it matters
India has long depended on other countries’ satellites and other countries’ models to understand its own land. SatSure is closing that gap from both ends at once — flying its own cameras and training its own AI to read what they see. From a loan officer trusting a satellite’s view of a harvest, to a government spotting a flood before it peaks, to a constellation of Indian satellites watching over Indian soil, the company is turning Earth observation from a foreign service into an Indian capability. And with Dhaarini, the country’s fields, forests, cities and coastlines will finally be read by a model that learned them at home.
Keep reading: Certified to Fly Day and Night: Inside Amber Wings’ ATVA, India’s First DGCA-Certified Hybrid Cargo Drone · Beyond Roads, Towards the Sky: Inside Hapida Sky, the Almora Startup Flying a Homemade Electric Aircraft · More Aerospace & Defense stories
Like stories like this? Add Exceptional Technology as a preferred source on Google to see more of our reporting in your search results and Discover feed.
