Naga Bharath Daka had already walked away from rockets once. He was an avionics engineer at ISRO, the kind of job an IIT Madras electrical engineer in India is supposed to hold for life. Then he left for three years at Xilinx, a semiconductor company, where the work was chips and not launches.
Most profiles skip that detour. It is the part that makes Skyroot make sense.
What almost nobody outside the community saw was how little ground there was to stand on.
His co-founder, Pawan Kumar Chandana, took the straighter road. Schooled in Andhra Pradesh, drawn to maths, physics and later rockets, he went to IIT Kharagpur for a B.Tech and M.Tech in mechanical engineering, then joined ISRO as a scientist in 2012. He spent nearly six years there on launch-vehicle propulsion. Daka, on the electronics side, had been a colleague at ISRO.
So one man knew how to make fire go the right way. The other knew what chips and avionics could do cheaply. Neither had a problem with the engineering. The problem was India.
What almost nobody outside the community saw was how little ground there was to stand on. Chandana has said that when they started in 2018 there was neither a private space-tech policy nor an environment to fund space ventures. A rocket company needs hundreds of crores before it earns one rupee, and the only customer, the government, had not yet agreed to let a private firm launch anything.
They registered the company on 12 June 2018 anyway, in Hyderabad. Four and a half years later, in November 2022, Vikram-S went up about 89.5 km, the first privately built rocket ever launched from India. It was a suborbital hop, but it changed what investors believed was possible. In October 2023 Temasek led a $27.5 million round that took total funding to about $95 million.
Then came the job that actually mattered. In July 2026 Vikram-1 reached orbit on Mission Aagaman, placing its payload at 450 km and making India the third country after the United States and China with a private orbital launch. By May 2026 a further round of about $60 million had pushed the valuation past $1.1 billion, India's first space-tech unicorn. Vikram-2 is planned for 2027, and a Reflect Orbital contract is already signed.
None of this is smooth. Launch capacity worldwide is short, the vehicle has to keep flying, and one failure can cost years. Skyroot's founders know that better than anyone; they have spent their careers around rockets that did not make it.
For a first-time founder, the quieter lesson sits in that Xilinx detour. Daka stepped out of the field he loved, learned a neighbouring craft, and came back with something his rocket-only colleagues did not have. The years that look like a pause on a CV are sometimes the ones that complete the team.