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TeamIndus, an aerospace start-up that won a $1-million Google Lunar X prize for its project to land a spacecraft on the Moon, is close to raising up to $10 million in its second round of funding.
The start-up, which counts Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and former Yahoo India R&D chief Sharad Sharma as its early investors, has already raised about $2 million. Vivek Raghavan, the Chief Product Manager and biometric architect at Unique Identification Authority of India, is now its Chief Technology Officer.
TeamIndus co-founder Rahul Narayan told BusinessLine that the fresh round of funding will come from existing and new investors.
TeamIndus shot into limelight when it won a competition promoted by Google for its project to build a privately-funded spacecraft to the moon by 2017. The vehicle would have to carry a robot and be capable of soft landing on the lunar surface; get the robot to travel 500 metres over the moon’s surface, and send video images and data back to Earth. .
“Ours is like a product start-up. The first milestone was winning the prize, the second will be when we put the spacecraft together and test it. The third will be a mock launch before the actual launch,” Narayan said.
The spacecraft will carry a 20-kg payload, of which 10 kg will be allotted for commercial use.
TeamIndus, which started off with about a dozen people, has now grown to over 100, which includes about 20 retired ISRO scientists, Narayan said.
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