India’s private space race has been won so far on the launch pad. Skyroot Aerospace put the country’s first privately built rocket into the sky; Agnikul Cosmos flew a semi-cryogenic engine that was 3D-printed as a single piece. Now a young Pune startup wants to go one layer deeper into the machine itself — the engine — and it has just raised money to prove it can.
BAAS Technologies, a spacetech company founded in 2024, has raised Rs 5 crore in a pre-seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures (IPV), with participation from SINE IIT Bombay and a group of private angel investors. The company designs indigenous rocket-propulsion systems — the hard, capital-heavy core of any launch business — and plans to use the capital to build the test infrastructure that turns propulsion designs into fired, validated engines. (Note the name: “BAAS” here is the launch-vehicle startup, not any banking-as-a-service firm.)
The raise
The Rs 5 crore pre-seed is small by the standards of a launch business, but it is aimed squarely at the part of the problem that money is hardest to raise for: early, unglamorous R&D and physical test hardware. According to reporting on the round, the proceeds will fund R&D on both liquid and solid propulsion systems, a dedicated static-test facility and manufacturing infrastructure, procurement of equipment and raw materials, and the expansion of the engineering and operations team — feeding into upcoming engine and flight tests.
The centrepiece of that spend is a 100 kN Rocket Propulsion Testing Facility in Pune. Per StartupTalky, the roughly 20,000-sq-ft site is designed for static fire tests on solid and liquid propulsion systems, covering engine validation, qualification and eventual commercialisation. Founded by Tanmay Kanmahale, Prashant Patil, Atharva Pingale, Swayam Sonar and Shriniwas Hase, BAAS says it is building reusable sub-orbital and orbital launch vehicles for commercial, research and government customers.
“This round with Inflection Point Ventures is a significant step for BAAS, and it puts us in a stronger position to build our launch vehicles, grow our engineering team, and contribute to India’s private space sector,” said Tanmay Kanmahale, co-founder and CEO, in comments reported by StartupTalky. IPV co-founder Ankur Mittal framed the bet on the platform: “BAAS is building an end-to-end launch vehicle platform that reflects the company’s strong engineering capabilities and its clear understanding of the growing demands of the global space economy.”
Why propulsion is the hard part
In launch, the engine is the whole ballgame. A rocket is mostly a fuel tank with an engine bolted to the bottom; get the propulsion wrong and nothing above it matters. That is precisely why propulsion is the subsystem most startups would rather buy than build — and why building it is where the durable, defensible engineering actually lives.
The difficulty is physical, not just financial. A rocket engine has to contain combustion at temperatures and pressures that would melt most materials, survive violent vibration and thermal cycling, and do it reliably enough that a single unit failure does not end a mission. Getting there means exotic alloys, cooling schemes, precise manufacturing tolerances and — above all — testing. Engines are validated by being fired, repeatedly, on the ground before they ever fly, which is why a static-test facility is not a nice-to-have but the gating asset for a propulsion company. BAAS choosing to spend a chunk of a modest pre-seed on a 100 kN test stand is a tell about where it thinks the real risk sits.
All of this is slow and capital-intensive. Propulsion development runs on a cadence of design, build, fire, fail, iterate — a loop measured in months and crores, not sprints. It is a poor fit for investors who want quick markups, and a large part of why home-grown engine work has historically stayed inside a national space agency rather than a startup’s garage.
India’s deepening space stack
What makes BAAS notable is less the size of the cheque than where in the stack it sits. India’s first wave of private launch companies proved that a startup could design, integrate and fly a vehicle. Skyroot’s Vikram-S showed a privately built rocket could reach space; Agnikul demonstrated an additively manufactured engine on a controlled flight. The headline milestones were about the vehicle.
The next phase is about the components underneath it — propulsion, avionics, aerostructures, test infrastructure — being built indigenously rather than imported or licensed. BAAS pitching itself explicitly as an indigenous-propulsion play, backed by an IIT-linked incubator and building its own test stand, is a sign the ecosystem is maturing from “can we fly a rocket?” to “can we own the hard subsystems that make rockets cheap and repeatable?”
The market context helps explain the timing. India’s domestic satellite launch services market is projected to grow from about $399 million in 2025 to $1.58 billion by 2033, a compound annual growth rate above 18%, per figures cited in coverage of the round. If that demand materialises, whoever controls reliable, affordable, home-built propulsion has leverage over the entire chain above it.
The India read
Read strategically, private spacetech in India is increasingly a national-capability play dressed as a startup story. Launch is dual-use by nature, and a country that can build its own engines — rather than depend on foreign suppliers whose export controls can shift with geopolitics — buys itself real strategic autonomy. That is the deeper case for backing a propulsion startup even when the near-term commercial market is still forming.
The talent pipeline is doing quiet work here too. BAAS is incubated in the SINE IIT Bombay orbit, and its founding team is a cluster of young engineers betting a company on propulsion, avionics and manufacturing. That is the IIT-incubation model working as intended: deeptech that is too slow and too hardware-heavy for a typical venture timeline gets an institutional runway — lab space, early capital, credibility — long enough to reach a first fired engine.
The honest caveat is distance. A Rs 5 crore pre-seed and a test facility on paper are the start of a very long road, not the arrival. Skyroot and Agnikul each spent years and far larger sums getting from first static fire to flight, and plenty of propulsion programmes stall in the gap between a validated engine and a vehicle that reaches orbit reliably. BAAS’s international ambitions — it says it has run paid pilots in India and is eyeing Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Australia — are a statement of intent, not yet a track record.
Still, the direction of travel is what matters. India’s private-space push began at the launch pad; it is now reaching into the engine. If the next set of milestones is measured in successful static fires from stands like the one BAAS wants to build in Pune, that is a healthy sign the country’s space stack is getting deeper, not just taller.
