Finnish space tech firm ReOrbit eyes India expansion, set to hire local talent

Helsinki: The European space technology firm, ReOrbit, founded by India-born Swedish citizen Sethu Saveda Suvanam, is all set to scale up its operations globally with one key expansion region being India, the company said. The development comes after ReOrbit bagged €45 million in the largest all-equity Series A round in Finland.

ReOrbit founder and CEO Sethu Saveda Suvanam.

ReOrbit manufactures sovereign satellites and connected systems to provide nations with independent communications, intelligence capabilities, and full command of critical assets. The company designs next-generation Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) small satellites.

Speaking to HT from ReOrbit’s headquarters at Henry Fordin Katu (or Henry Ford street), Hernesaari, in Helsinki, Suvanam said the company has taken “a very conscious decision” to have a significant number of their workforce in India as the country has “a very dynamic (space) ecosystem that is already established”.

An engineering graduate from Anna University, Chennai, he said the company will also be looking at attracting talent from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).

“Hirings have already begun. We have potentially one person, a pretty well-known, big name, who will lead our India office,” he said, adding that at present, the firm has an Indian entity in Hyderabad, his home city.

Suvanam also noted that easy access to new markets will be an added advantage for ReOrbit in India. “ While Finland’s proximity to NATO countries works to ReOrbit’s advantage, India will be the start-up’s gateway to the broader Asian market,” he said.

Suvanam, who holds a PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and completed postdoctoral research on solar cell materials for space exploration from Uppsala University, further said that India has never exported space per se. “Even the several space companies in India are very focused on local entities. So, one of the key ideas for us to come to India is to take India out. It’s not about selling to India, but it’s about using the technologies in India to globally sell,” he said.

“The world, in the last four years, has seen seven to eight minor and major conflicts - be it India-Pakistan or Ukraine-Russia. Traditionally, one thinks of warfare as boots on ground, huge guns, missiles. But every recent war was fought on autonomous systems. The common thread across recent conflicts is clear: data originates from space, is controlled through space and is injected directly into warfare. In essence, the wars of the past four years are increasingly fought from space via space,” he said.

“With a handful countries including India possessing end-to-end capability to build whole space systems, the rest are directly or indirectly dependent on a few countries. In today’s increasingly polarised world, nations are no longer willing to depend solely on others — they want to build and control their own sovereign ecosystems and critical infrastructures,” he added.

Separately, Pawan Goenka, chairman of the Department of Space-affiliated regulatory body for the space industry, Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (In-Space), told HT that generally there is a lot of interest in India’s space sector from companies outside India. “Overall it will provide momentum to our aspiration of a 44 billion space economy,” he said.