By Wayne Heilman
An India-based aerospace startup plans to spend $35 million during the next three years to open a satellite assembly, integration and testing plant in Colorado Springs that will employ 61 people, the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce & EDC announced Feb. 10.
Digantara is developing a network of up to 15 small “cube” satellites (4- to 8-inch cube-shaped spacecraft weighing 3.5 to 122 pounds) during the next three years. They will be used to manage growing orbital traffic and avoid collisions among the more than 1 million objects in space.
The announcement was made during a news conference featuring Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Colorado Springs Mayor Yemi Mobolade and other local and chamber officials.
“Colorado stands at the heart of the U.S. aerospace-defense ecosystem, making it the perfect base for Digantara. Here, we aim to collaborate with the U.S. aerospace and defense community locally, advancing global space security through innovation and partnership,” company CEO Anirudh Sharma said at the news conference. Digantara selected Colorado Springs over Denver, the San Francisco area and locations in North Carolina and Texas.
The company, which now employs 70 people, will open its first U.S. office in the Catalyst Campus for Technology & Innovation Space Domain Awareness (SDA) Tools, Applications and Process (TAP) Lab, becoming the first foreign company at the campus. Digantara plans to eventually build a small manufacturing plant or lease space it will renovate and later expand to match the size of its 100,000-square-foot plant in Bangalore, India.
Sharma said the company began its search for a U.S. location about a year ago because many of its customers are U.S. defense agencies and contractors. The chamber began working with Digantara about nine months ago through referrals from state and federal officials.
Digantara launched its first satellite, the Space Camera for Object Tracking (SCOT), last month aboard a SpaceX rocket. The satellite is designed to track and provide constant monitoring of objects as small as 2 inches in low-Earth orbit. Sharma said the company wants to build “a Google Maps for space” with its small satellites, which cost about $2 million each to manufacture, compared with $30 million for traditional, large satellites.
Sharma founded the company while in college in 2018 as a spinoff of his university satellite team and, in 2023, received $10 million in venture capital funding led by Peak XV Partners, formerly known as Sequoia Capital India.
Digantara, under the code name Project Diamond, has been approved for $1.77 million in income tax credits and sales/use tax rebates from the Colorado Economic Development Commission, the Colorado Springs City Council and the El Paso County Economic Development Department. The company plans to hire software and systems engineers, business developers, human resources and finance staff with an average annual salary of $82,645.
More than 2,000 aerospace companies operate in Colorado, providing jobs for more than 55,000 people and Digantara’s expansion to Colorado Springs will help the state “continue its leadership in the space domain,” Polis said during the news conference.
