GALAXEYE

GalaxEye is a space technology company that builds Earth observation satellites in Bengaluru, India. It was founded in 2021 by a group of engineers at IIT Madras. The company wants to make every part of the Earth easy to see, whatever the weather, time of day or terrain.

Its first satellite is called Mission Drishti. It carries two sensors on one platform: a radar sensor (SAR) and a multispectral imager (MSI). GalaxEye calls this approach OptoSAR and says Mission Drishti is the first commercial satellite to combine the two. Optical images are easy to read but cloud, darkness and bad weather can block them. Radar works in any weather, day and night, but its images are hard to interpret. Capturing both in one pass gives aligned images that are ready to analyse, without fusing data from separate sources.

The technical details are specific. The SAR sensor works in X-band with VV polarisation. It has Stripmap and Spotlight modes and reaches a resolution of up to 0.9 metres in Spotlight mode. The imager has seven bands, including Coastal Blue, Red Edge and near infrared. Its native resolution is 3.6 metres, and the fused images reach 1.8 metres. The swath is 30 kilometres for SAR and 10 kilometres for the imager. GalaxEye describes Mission Drishti as India's largest privately built satellite, with the highest-resolution imagery of any private player in the country. Launch was planned for the first quarter of 2026 on a SpaceX Transporter mission.

GalaxEye offers the imagery to developers, enterprises and resellers who want to build products on top of it. It lists uses in defence, infrastructure monitoring and agriculture. The company also says the fused images speed up the labelling of training data for AI models, including target recognition and change detection. An early adopters programme gives selected users early access to datasets. The company has also acquired StarOps.

The company has a record of milestones. It began rail testing of its Drishti sensor in January 2022 and produced its first SAR image in December 2022. It raised a seed round of US$3.5 million in December 2022 and closed a US$10 million Series A in June 2024. Its team ran user trials of the Drishti sensor with the Indian Army's Northern Command in February 2024. In May 2024 it built and demonstrated a SAR sensor for high-altitude platform stations. In June 2024 it won the iDEX-DIO Challenge for satellite edge computing. In December 2024 it flew a tech demo on the ISRO POEM mission, and in June 2025 it captured a long SAR image by drone in India.

GalaxEye has been named to the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list for 2025 and was chosen for the World Economic Forum's 25th cohort of Technology Pioneers.

Services

• OptoSAR Earth observation satellite imagery
• SAR and multispectral imagery
• Mission Drishti satellite
• Fused SAR and optical datasets
• Early access dataset programme
• Satellite edge computing
• Drone-based SAR imaging