ET BureauBENGALURU: Bengaluru headquartered space startup Team Indus has won a $1 million prize for completing an intermediate milestone as it competed with teams from across the world to become the first private enterprise which will land a robot on the moon.
Team Indus is one of the five teams in the $30-million Google Lunar Xprize, that crossed a major milestone of developing a robot that can land on the moon and travel 500 metres on its surface and send data back to earth. “This is good news for India for sure, but it is a better news for the mankind because it shows that governments no longer have a monopoly on space exploration,” said entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa in a statement.
Team Indus is up against large private funded companies like the Moon Express, Astrobotic —a spinoff from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute and Israel-based Space-IL backed by several top Israeli institutions.
The mission, when complete, is expected to cost about $30 million. About 26 teams from around the world are taking part in the Google Lunar Xprize. “I expect it will inspire Indian entrepreneurs to solve many big problems that the country has,” said Wadhwa.
Team Indus, founded by IT executive Rahul Narayan, Indranil Chakraborty and Julius Amrit, has raised seed capital from a clutch of investors including Subrata Mitra and Shekhar Kirani of Accel Partners, Sharad Sharma, the founding member of software products thinktank Ispirt, Vivek Raghavan, chief product manager of UIDAI and others.
Last month, Xprize, an incentive driven competition that aims to rally problem solvers from across the world to take on big challenges, launched in India. Industrialist Ratan Tata, Naveen Jain of Inome and Paresh Ghelani of BPG Motors brought the prize to India, the first country outside the United States for Xprize.
Team Indus is one of the five teams in the $30-million Google Lunar Xprize, that crossed a major milestone of developing a robot that can land on the moon and travel 500 metres on its surface and send data back to earth. “This is good news for India for sure, but it is a better news for the mankind because it shows that governments no longer have a monopoly on space exploration,” said entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa in a statement.
Team Indus is up against large private funded companies like the Moon Express, Astrobotic —a spinoff from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute and Israel-based Space-IL backed by several top Israeli institutions.
The mission, when complete, is expected to cost about $30 million. About 26 teams from around the world are taking part in the Google Lunar Xprize. “I expect it will inspire Indian entrepreneurs to solve many big problems that the country has,” said Wadhwa.
Team Indus, founded by IT executive Rahul Narayan, Indranil Chakraborty and Julius Amrit, has raised seed capital from a clutch of investors including Subrata Mitra and Shekhar Kirani of Accel Partners, Sharad Sharma, the founding member of software products thinktank Ispirt, Vivek Raghavan, chief product manager of UIDAI and others.
Last month, Xprize, an incentive driven competition that aims to rally problem solvers from across the world to take on big challenges, launched in India. Industrialist Ratan Tata, Naveen Jain of Inome and Paresh Ghelani of BPG Motors brought the prize to India, the first country outside the United States for Xprize.
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