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Anirudh Sharma, CEO of Digantara, spoke at the 9th Carnegie Global Tech Summit on the theme 'Guardians of Galaxy: Space Security Norms and Partnerships' and said that people working in the space sector have to be global from the start.
Sharma said that one needs a lot of venture capital in the space industry and, hence, has to be working openly instead of serving one particular market. "Space is global in nature. So as a sector itself, when you start a company within the space industry, you have to be global from day one. You can't be serving one particular market to become a billion-dollar company because in this sector, you also need a lot of funding to start with, which means you need to raise venture capital money or should be funded by the government," he said. Sharma said that to work closely with these challenges, one must work with accelerated programmes and government agencies. "So the first step to this approach is to work closely with these defence challenges and a few accelerated programmes where you get that first foot into the door by working with these government agencies," he said. Sharma said that Digantra started working in India, the US and Singapore to achieve a global status. "Secondly, what we've done at Digantra is basically take a different approach where we started to solve for understanding how local regulations work and how can we solve for it locally than focusing on one single company in one particular part of the world. For instance, we have our company based in India, Singapore and the US," he said. He said they employ Americans in their US entity to solve the problem of Indian companies "not being able to access US markets directly." overcome the barrier to India's entry. "For the US market, we use our US entity to solely focus towards programmes and so for the US military market because the regulatory framework is very different when it comes to space military aspect. So we have American citizens working in our US entity to solve for that problem of Indian company not being able to access US markets directly. That's one part," he said. Sharma said the US is the largest market within the space industry for any commercial company, and it is essential for India to enter it. "Having said that, US being the largest market within the space industry for any commercial company, it was very important for us to solve for having an entity there to be able to access a larger portion of the market. So that's how we went about approaching this particular problem," he said. He added that several private companies today are working on bridge programs like INDUSX to solve the issues created by market barriers. "A lot of private companies today, like although they are working on, you know, bridge programmes like INDUSX where you have India, US, coming together, giving a challenge and working on it. It is still not happening at scale where a commercial company can rely on this totally. So it's just a foot into the door, but then you have to figure out yourself," he said. (ANI)
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