Quarkitech Raises ₹2 Crore to Tame the Sensor-Data Deluge on India's Drones and Satellites

Modern defence and aerospace platforms have a data problem that rarely makes headlines: their sensors now generate far more raw information than the platforms can store, process or beam back home. A single hyperspectral or synthetic-aperture-radar pass can produce hundreds of megabytes in seconds, and much of that has to travel down constrained, often contested, communication links. A Chennai deep-tech startup wants to attack that bottleneck at its root — by shrinking the data the moment it is captured.

On 12 August 2026, Quarkitech, a company based at the IIT Madras Research Park, said it had raised ₹2 crore in a pre-seed round to build out its sensor-data compression technology for defence, aerospace and other data-intensive applications. Separately, it has secured a ₹1.5 crore grant under the National Quantum Mission (NQM).

What Quarkitech is building

At the heart of the company is software that compresses sensor data at the source — before it is stored or transmitted — by a factor of roughly 10 to 100, according to the startup. The technology targets radar, LiDAR, hyperspectral and electro-optical systems mounted on UAVs, satellites and similar platforms, exactly the sensor classes where raw data volumes have outrun downlink bandwidth.

The claim that matters most to defence and space users is not raw compression ratio but fidelity. In laboratory testing, Quarkitech reports a 26x reduction in data volume while retaining 98% of what it calls mission-critical information. For an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operator, aggressive compression is only useful if it does not discard the faint signal they were hunting for in the first place.

Just as important is where the software runs. Quarkitech says its algorithms are designed to integrate with existing onboard computers and to execute across both CPUs and GPUs, without requiring specialised hardware. That is a meaningful design choice: retrofitting compression onto platforms already in the field is far cheaper than redesigning the payload around a new chip. The company says it is now validating the technology under real-world operating conditions.

The backers — and a quantum-mission grant

The ₹2 crore pre-seed was led by Artha Access, a programme run under Artha Venture Fund II, alongside early-stage investor Finvolve. The round is the company's first institutional capital, and the founders say it will go towards research and development, engineering talent, intellectual property, certifications and moving the product up the technology-readiness ladder.

The second tranche of support is arguably as telling as the venture cheque. Quarkitech has received a ₹1.5 crore grant under the National Quantum Mission — the ₹6,000-crore-plus programme the Union Cabinet approved in 2023 — routed through the IITM–CDOT Samgnya Technologies Foundation, one of the mission's thematic hubs. Grant capital of this kind is non-dilutive and, for a hardware-adjacent deep-tech startup, often the difference between a lab demo and a fielded prototype.

The quantum-inspired angle

Compression is the commercial wedge, but it is not the whole company. Quarkitech describes itself as a builder of simulation tools and quantum-inspired algorithms — classical computing techniques that borrow ideas from quantum algorithms to attack large-scale combinatorial optimisation problems. The company frames the addressable areas broadly, spanning finance, deep science and other mission-critical domains where the number of possible solutions explodes beyond what brute-force methods can search efficiently. Founding member Vishnu P.K. leads the quantum-algorithms work.

That dual identity — a near-term data-compression product with a longer-horizon optimisation platform — is characteristic of India's current deep-tech cohort, where founders increasingly pair a fundable, specific first use case with a broader research thesis.

Founders and base

Quarkitech was founded in January 2025 by Rajesh Narayanan, Sanyam Parashar and Shashikant Singh Kunwar, with Vishnu P.K. as a founding member. Operating from the IIT Madras Research Park — one of India's densest concentrations of deep-tech incubation — the young company is squarely in the ecosystem the government has been trying to cultivate around Chennai, from semiconductors to space.

Why it matters

India is fielding an ever-larger fleet of sensor-heavy platforms: earth-observation constellations from private space startups, indigenous surveillance and reconnaissance drones, and radar systems across the armed forces. Every one of them faces the same tension between how much data a sensor can generate and how much a platform can practically move or store, especially in bandwidth-starved or jamming-prone environments.

Software that squeezes that data at the edge — without new hardware and without throwing away the signal that matters — is precisely the kind of unglamorous enabling layer that determines whether a constellation or a drone swarm is actually useful in the field. If Quarkitech's field validation holds up to its lab numbers, the company will have carved out a defensible niche in India's fast-growing defence and space stack. For now, a ₹2 crore pre-seed and an NQM grant buy it the runway to prove the claim.

Sources

• Entrackr — Deep-tech startup Quarkitech raises pre-seed funding
• Indian Startup News — Quarkitech raises Rs 2 crore in pre-seed funding, reports Rs 1.5 crore quantum mission grant
• VCCircle/VieStories — Deeptech Startup Quarkitech Raises ₹2 Crore in Pre-Seed Round
• Funding Times — Quarkitech raises ₹2 crore to advance sensor data compression technology
• NewsBytes — Quarkitech based at IIT Madras raises ₹2cr pre-seed for compression