Pranit Mehta, co-founder and VP-business development, GalaxEye Space
Bengaluru-based space startup GalaxEye Space will launch its first commercial satellite in October this year. The multi-sensor satellite will monitor aquaculture water bodies in real time using its proprietary multi-sensor satellite imaging technology, said Pranit Mehta, co-founder and VP – business development of the company.
It is for the first time that a multi-sensor satellite is being launched. The satellite will have a traditional camera to capture multi-spectral images, and the second is a synthetic aperture radar. These two different sensors will be together on the same platform and capturing image at the same time.
“There are a bunch of vendors that we have partnered with, mostly in India and some abroad as well, who are helping us put together the satellite, and the launch is with SpaceX,” he told businessline in an online interaction. The company has validated its tech on various platforms, built several prototypes, he said.
GalaxEye, launched in 2021 by IIT-Madras alumni, held a tech demo earlier in December 2024 with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The start-up has raised three rounds of funding totalling $14 million, with Infosys among its top investors. The satellite will basically provide more inputs on aquaculture, agriculture and allied activities, he said.
“We have picked up a very niche segment within the agriculture space, which is shrimp farming in the aquaculture domain. We have a software called Galaxy Blue, which is tailored for the aquaculture sector and conducts all forms of satellite imagery analysis and delivers insights,” he said.
The software, a stack, has three layers of functioning. The first is that it will map ponds or clusters anywhere on Earth. It can go 15-20 years back in time to map the growth of these ponds.
“To put some numbers to it, we have globally mapped more than 10,00,000 shrimp ponds, which is the largest such database that exists. In India, we monitor almost all shrimp ponds across several states,” said Mehta.
The company’s users are businesses and government bodies looking to digitise farming and come up with a market strategy. The second layer is monitoring the ponds frequently and see if there is any halt or shrimps are harvested.
“This can help estimate the supply. It acts as trade intelligence, bringing in transparency to the ecosystem,” the GalaxEye official said. The third layer of functioning is to monitor the health parameters, carrying out quality analysis to find out pH, salinity, ammonia, calcium, magnesium and other contents. This saves farmers from walking miles to get details from a laboratory.
“They get these parameters. Therefore, they will be able to foresee if there’s any potential disease outbreak. All of this is only from imagery data of satellites. We don’t install any sensors in the pond,” he said.
GalaxEye Space has worked on this for over three years now, and it was commercialised a year and a half ago. The pilots have been done in different parts of the country, mostly Andhra Pradesh where 70 per cent of the industrial farming takes place. It has done a couple of pilots globally too.
GalaxEye’s software interprets the satellite images, though it currently depends on the existing satellites launched by ISRO or NASA or the European Space Agency. “The challenge is the resolution of the image.
For example, the European Space Agency has a series of satellites called Sentinel, which is the most widely used open source imagery data. But they give data at a 10-metre resolution, which means anything less than 10 metres resolution cannot be captured by the satellite image.
“The satellite that we are launching will be less than 2 metres resolution, so you get a lot more information about the same pond. It’s way more accurate, and therefore decisions are more reliable,” said Mehta.
GalaxEye plans for even a higher resolution when it launches its second satellite. “Over the next five years, we are targeting a constellation to be set up with which the frequency and the global monitoring capabilities will rapidly scale up,” he said.
On the costs, the company official said it will depend on monitoring certain regions. The subscription to the company’s services are based on how much area the buyer wants to monitor. The buyers will be given daily reports.
GalaxEye Space does not have much competition for offering this service, Mehta claimed. Only in two instances had satellite imagery entered the aquaculture space. One was through a US company and the other via a Norway firm. Both shut down operations after being around for a couple of years. However, the Bengaluru-based firm will make it economical for its customers.
The company will make use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. “Our software has essentially 3 blocks. One is the imagery data, which comes in as input. Second is we use simple physics. We use things like spectrometers that are launched on the satellite. The third is AI models,” he said..
GalaxEye, which is full operational in India, can also monitor oil palm plantations or farm lands globally. It can help importers and exporters to assess commodities in whichever part of the global they are grown, the company’s VP-business development said.
Published on May 20, 2025
Pranit Mehta, co-founder and VP-business development, GalaxEye Space
Bengaluru-based space startup GalaxEye Space will launch its first commercial satellite in October this year. The multi-sensor satellite will monitor aquaculture water bodies in real time using its proprietary multi-sensor satellite imaging technology, said Pranit Mehta, co-founder and VP – business development of the company.
It is for the first time that a multi-sensor satellite is being launched. The satellite will have a traditional camera to capture multi-spectral images, and the second is a synthetic aperture radar. These two different sensors will be together on the same platform and capturing image at the same time.
“There are a bunch of vendors that we have partnered with, mostly in India and some abroad as well, who are helping us put together the satellite, and the launch is with SpaceX,” he told businessline in an online interaction. The company has validated its tech on various platforms, built several prototypes, he said.
GalaxEye, launched in 2021 by IIT-Madras alumni, held a tech demo earlier in December 2024 with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The start-up has raised three rounds of funding totalling $14 million, with Infosys among its top investors. The satellite will basically provide more inputs on aquaculture, agriculture and allied activities, he said.
“We have picked up a very niche segment within the agriculture space, which is shrimp farming in the aquaculture domain. We have a software called Galaxy Blue, which is tailored for the aquaculture sector and conducts all forms of satellite imagery analysis and delivers insights,” he said.
The software, a stack, has three layers of functioning. The first is that it will map ponds or clusters anywhere on Earth. It can go 15-20 years back in time to map the growth of these ponds.
“To put some numbers to it, we have globally mapped more than 10,00,000 shrimp ponds, which is the largest such database that exists. In India, we monitor almost all shrimp ponds across several states,” said Mehta.
The company’s users are businesses and government bodies looking to digitise farming and come up with a market strategy. The second layer is monitoring the ponds frequently and see if there is any halt or shrimps are harvested.
“This can help estimate the supply. It acts as trade intelligence, bringing in transparency to the ecosystem,” the GalaxEye official said. The third layer of functioning is to monitor the health parameters, carrying out quality analysis to find out pH, salinity, ammonia, calcium, magnesium and other contents. This saves farmers from walking miles to get details from a laboratory.
“They get these parameters. Therefore, they will be able to foresee if there’s any potential disease outbreak. All of this is only from imagery data of satellites. We don’t install any sensors in the pond,” he said.
GalaxEye Space has worked on this for over three years now, and it was commercialised a year and a half ago. The pilots have been done in different parts of the country, mostly Andhra Pradesh where 70 per cent of the industrial farming takes place. It has done a couple of pilots globally too.
GalaxEye’s software interprets the satellite images, though it currently depends on the existing satellites launched by ISRO or NASA or the European Space Agency. “The challenge is the resolution of the image.
For example, the European Space Agency has a series of satellites called Sentinel, which is the most widely used open source imagery data. But they give data at a 10-metre resolution, which means anything less than 10 metres resolution cannot be captured by the satellite image.
“The satellite that we are launching will be less than 2 metres resolution, so you get a lot more information about the same pond. It’s way more accurate, and therefore decisions are more reliable,” said Mehta.
GalaxEye plans for even a higher resolution when it launches its second satellite. “Over the next five years, we are targeting a constellation to be set up with which the frequency and the global monitoring capabilities will rapidly scale up,” he said.
On the costs, the company official said it will depend on monitoring certain regions. The subscription to the company’s services are based on how much area the buyer wants to monitor. The buyers will be given daily reports.
GalaxEye Space does not have much competition for offering this service, Mehta claimed. Only in two instances had satellite imagery entered the aquaculture space. One was through a US company and the other via a Norway firm. Both shut down operations after being around for a couple of years. However, the Bengaluru-based firm will make it economical for its customers.
The company will make use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. “Our software has essentially 3 blocks. One is the imagery data, which comes in as input. Second is we use simple physics. We use things like spectrometers that are launched on the satellite. The third is AI models,” he said..
GalaxEye, which is full operational in India, can also monitor oil palm plantations or farm lands globally. It can help importers and exporters to assess commodities in whichever part of the global they are grown, the company’s VP-business development said.
Published on May 20, 2025
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The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making
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It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution
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