Digantara's Bet on Space-Situational Awareness and Missile Defense

Digantara has raised the capital to build a business most investors still treat as niche: knowing where everything in orbit actually is. The Bengaluru company closed a $50 million Series B in December 2025, led by 360 ONE Asset with participation from Japan's SBI Investments and entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala, bringing total funding to roughly $64.5 million. The round funds a deliberate expansion from commercial space-situational awareness into the far larger and better-funded territory of missile defence.

What the money builds

The Series B underwrites a constellation buildout and a strategic pivot across 2026 and 2027. Digantara plans to deploy 15 SSA satellites and, more significantly, 2 missile-warning satellites, alongside expansion into the US and Europe and a network of ground-based LiDAR observatories. The company has also partnered with Singapore's Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), a customer signal that its tracking data meets a foreign defence ministry's standards.

Space-situational awareness is the practice of detecting, cataloguing and predicting the motion of resident space objects, the satellites, spent rocket bodies and debris fragments crowding Earth orbit. The problem is intensifying. Tens of thousands of tracked objects, and far more untracked fragments, now share increasingly congested orbital shells, and every active satellite operator needs collision-avoidance data to protect assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Ground radar and optical networks have historically supplied this, but they are limited by geography, weather and the horizon. A space-based tracking layer sees objects that ground sensors miss.

Digantara's flagship sensor is SCOT, the Space Camera for Object Tracking, launched in January 2025 on SpaceX's Transporter-12 rideshare. SCOT is an in-orbit optical tracker that, by observing from space rather than the ground, can detect and characterise objects as small as roughly 5 centimetres in sun-synchronous orbit. Resolving objects at that scale is the difference between a useful conjunction warning and a guess, because debris in the few-centimetre range is large enough to destroy a satellite on impact but small enough to evade most ground catalogues.

Why the missile-warning pivot matters to investors

SSA has an attractive financial shape. It is high-margin, because once the constellation and data pipeline exist the marginal cost of serving another customer is low. It is dual-use, serving commercial operators, insurers and defence agencies from the same infrastructure. And it is government-anchored, with demand underwritten by the orbital-debris crisis and by national-security mandates that are politically durable rather than cyclical. Those characteristics, recurring data revenue against a fixed asset base, are what make SSA appealing despite the upfront capital intensity.

The missile-warning satellites are the more consequential bet. Space-based missile warning detects launches and tracks ballistic and hypersonic threats from orbit, and it taps defence budgets that dwarf the commercial SSA market by orders of magnitude. As hypersonic and manoeuvring threats proliferate, demand for persistent overhead tracking is rising across the US, Europe and the Indo-Pacific. By extending the same tracking competence from debris to threats, Digantara is positioning a commercial sensor company to compete for programs traditionally reserved for state primes, where contract sizes and durations are an entirely different scale from commercial data subscriptions.

The caveats are appropriate. Two missile-warning satellites are a demonstration, not an operational early-warning system, and defence procurement is slow, relationship-driven and dominated by entrenched incumbents. SSA pricing remains immature, and an Indian firm selling tracking data to Western and allied defence customers must clear export-control, certification and trust hurdles that have no quick path. What Digantara has secured is the capital, the orbital sensors and a foreign-government partner to attempt the move from a niche commercial service into a defence-grade capability. The orbital-debris tailwind makes the base business credible; the missile-warning pivot is where the asymmetric upside, and the execution risk, both sit.