Unlike many of his peers, Anirudh Sharma didn’t grow up dreaming of working in the space industry. Founding the Indian space surveillance company Digantara—Sanskrit for “space”—at 19 was, in his words, “very accidental.”
Bored after his first year as a computer science undergrad, Sharma recalled catching up with his schoolmate Tanveer Ahmed—now Digantara’s CTO—who mentioned he was participating in ISRO’s student satellite program. The conversation sparked Sharma’s interest, and soon he co-founded a student satellite team of his own. That hands-on work, Sharma says, gave him a “raw, unfiltered look” at the gaps in space infrastructure.
As satellites multiplied in orbit, Sharma realized systems to track and safeguard them weren’t keeping pace—especially for emerging space nations. Just as aviation relies on air traffic control, he said, space would one day need its own system to manage activity in Earth’s increasingly busy orbits.
Liftoff: Digantara began as a spinoff from that student project. It quickly grew into one of India’s most promising space startups, and a global player in the fast-emerging field of space domain awareness.
The real business case didn’t come into focus until 2019, when Sharma and his team presented a concept for using lidar to track space objects at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C. “A lot of people came up to us and said, ‘Hey, this idea seems really good. Why don’t you pursue it as a commercial business?’”
By 2020, Bengaluru-based Digantara had pivoted fully to space traffic management, backed by a pre-seed grant of INR 25 lakh (~$30,000) from the Indian Institute of Science. In those five years, Digantara has scaled from a five-person student team to a 100+ member workforce that includes scientists and engineers from ISRO, NASA and the U.S. Air Force.
Eyes in the sky: The case for space-based debris tracking, Sharma explained, is that because about 70% of Earth is covered by water, global ground-based tracking inevitably leaves blind spots. Plus, the atmosphere itself introduces distortions—such as cloud cover, turbulence, and other effects—that make ground-based observations both difficult and expensive.
“So we decided, why not build systems like remote sensing satellites, but for space?” said Sharma. “For us, tracking means tracking persistently. Evolving in our journey, we realized that it cannot be just space-based or just ground-based—it has to be both.”
