Raising the stakes in the nation's developing space industry, India's Skyroot Aerospace announced that it has raised $27.5 million in a new investment round headed by Singapore's Temasek, days after competitor Agnikul Cosmos raised a sum comparable to this. The Hyderabad-based company is scheduled to launch the Vikram-I, its second commercial rocket, next year. The company launched India's first private rocket in 2022. Up to 300 kilogramme payloads can be carried into low-Earth orbit using the launch vehicle.

Skyroot, founded in 2018, claimed that it would be able to introduce additional products more quickly thanks to the most recent fund raise of roughly 2.25 billion rupees. In response to the successful lunar landing of an Indian spacecraft, private space companies have announced that they have raised an additional $26.7 million in investment for Agnikul Cosmos, a fellow space startup, ahead of the latter's first rocket launch.

Agnikul has raised $40 million, compared to $95 million raised by Skyroot thus far. Skyroot refused to disclose how much the company was worth following its most recent fundraising. "With this additional funding, we will be able to expedite our upcoming launches scheduled over the next two years as we get ready to launch our second mission early next year," stated Pawan Kumar Chandana, half of Skyroot.

Declaring that the success of India's Chandrayaan-3 moon mission had bolstered the nation's private space industry, Chandana said Reuters in August that the company planned to launch at least two times starting in 2024. Skyroot and the French space companies Promethee Earth Intelligence, ConnectSAT, and the international company Expleo inked a memorandum of agreement to launch satellites and provide software support for their respective Vikram launches. Skyroot, which is supported by GIC, Singapore's government wealth fund, did not provide the financial details of those collaborations.