Premji-backed iD Fresh appoints Shobhit Malhotra as CEO for global biz
Bengaluru: Premji Invest-backed iD Fresh Food has appointed Shobhit Malhotra as CEO, International Business to pursue the Bengaluru-headquartered company's ambition of taking its brand global.Shobhit will spearhead iD Fresh's international journey, overseeing established operations in the GCC region and leading the brand's entry into high-potential markets. His focus will be on product innovation tailored to local consumer preferences in each market, building strategic partnerships, and enhancing distribution networks to establish iD Fresh as a trusted, premium and global fresh food brand, the company said in a statement.iD Fresh Food chairman PC Musthafa said, "Shobhit's proven track record in leading business transformations across complex markets makes him a great fit for iD Fresh's global ambitions. His passion for building purpose-led brands and his deep understanding of diverse consumer cultures aligns perfectly with our mission of bringing fresh and healthy food to the world. We are thrilled to welcome him to the iD family to lead the war against preservatives and chemicals."Malhotra added that the opportunity to scale a homegrown success story across new international frontiers is both humbling and energizing."Shobhit brings over two decades of leadership experience in the global consumer goods industry, having held senior positions at Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, and PepsiCo. His expertise in strategic insights, analytics excellence, operational acumen, and people-first leadership has consistently driven strong commercial results and fostered growth across complex and diverse markets.
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The demand is certain, and is helping us generate a steady revenue stream this fiscal year." GalaxEye is a second entrant pivoting into this ecosystem. Last month, chief executive Suyash Singh announced the venture's entry into the high-resolution-imaging satellite market—with a view to tap the rising demand for surveillance data from around the world. On 2 July, fellow startup Bellatrix Aerospace followed suit, introducing what it said was an 'ultra-low-earth satellite delivering lower latency, sharper imagery and dramatically reduced mission costs" than established surveillance satellite projects. Each of them is vying for a market where Bengaluru-origin space startup Pixxel made an early entry, offering ultra-high-resolution surveillance satellites to nations in a 'data-as-a-service' format. The company has already established its presence in the US, winning contracts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). There are veteran companies in this space, too. Ananth Technologies, run by Subba Rao Pavuluri—a former engineer with the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), today operates three satellite manufacturing lines in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Thiruvananthapuram. The company, established in 1992, has been a supplier to Isro for three decades, and has built surveillance satellites under the Earth Observation Satellite (Eos) series for New Delhi. Today, it is opening up its capacities to make satellites for global customers. To do that, Ananth Technologies is competing for global space defence infrastructure orders with Alpha Design Technologies, an aerospace and defence manufacturing company acquired in 2019 by Adani Group arm Adani Defence and Aerospace. Eying these opportunities, Big Tech is gradually making moves. In June 2023, Google became an early investor in Pixxel. On 8 July this year, Amazon Web Services announced a second edition of its Space Accelerator programme, with the goal of offering 40 startups with 'business resources, expertise and guidance". Two of Amazon's five key areas of focus in its space startups incubator campaign are satellite imagery and geospatial applications—key to the nascent space defence sector. Interestingly, while this year's edition of the Amazon accelerator will be available in four countries, the inaugural 2024 edition targeted India alone—reflecting the rising amount of interest in this industry. Each of these moves is boosting India as a key resource for geospatial defence infrastructure. Sarjan Shah, managing director–India at JSW Defence's US partner Shield AI, said that there is ample appetite for aerial defence infrastructure upgrades with private sector partnership in the country—a field that has received a 'considerable fillip since Operation Sindoor". 'There is a clear sentiment within the private industry as well as the government that India's defence forces are well-poised for infrastructure upgrades in aerial capacities," Shah added. The JSW-Shield AI partnership, valued at $90 million, will give the Indian company's defence and space subsidiary, JSW Defence, indigenous capability to manufacture unmanned surveillance and ballistic aircraft—crucial parts of modern-day warfare. The indigenization is currently underway, taking place through a transfer-of-technology agreement that the two entities have running. This will give JSW Defence access to Shield's proprietary unmanned aerial vehicle technologies—applicable in space warfare, defence and surveillance services. 'With technology partnership and transfer, India can also become a vital supplier of aerial defence infrastructure to trusted geographies—given the current balance of global geopolitics, which rules out multiple previously-established countries as viable partners for the world," said Shah. An opportune moment Why is there such a sudden flurry of activity in India to cash in on the space industry? The answers are not unidirectional, but all narrow down to one point: India is in the right place, at the right time. The embers began to glow in 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to sanctions being imposed against it by most European nations. This led to a dearth in space engineering and manufacturing supply—Russia was a major provider of satellite manufacturing, especially in defence and surveillance use cases. Over the past nine months, rising geopolitical tensions in West Asia, and the India-Pakistan skirmish in April, have led to more nations wanting their own, sovereign geopolitical solutions. These factors, coupled with the US not catering to every nation as a result of its stringent defence partnership policies, have put India in a strategically advantageous position as a satellite and space technology supplier to the world. For instance, over the past two years, India has replaced Russia as the primary defence and national security supplier to Armenia. Today, the nation's reliance on India includes using its space technologies ecosystem—giving the private entities mentioned above a steady, recurring market to cater to. 'A large part of why India's space sector is seeing such a defence-led boom is the fact that many of the older, existing supplier markets are today out of the question," said Vinit Khandare, director at policy consultancy and services organization Strategy Research and Growth Foundation. 'The US does not supply space-based surveillance infrastructure or data to every country, and partnerships with Russia are no longer sustainable since Russia itself is engaged in various geopolitical conflicts. France was a key partner, but with the manufacturing sector being too expensive in the European Union, it is no longer an entity either. Enter, India." Companies are already seeing a rising amount of commercial activity. 'We're certainly getting an increasing number of orders from nations across Asia and the global South—which are India's focus areas," said Ananth's Pavuluri. 'In anticipation of rising orders for sovereign surveillance satellites, we've ramped up capacity to currently operate larger satellite assembly facilities than some of the world's biggest players in this sector—such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin." But it's not just a game of manufacturing, say stakeholders. GalaxEye's Singh noted that the 'rising amount of interest in the sector is giving India plenty of opportunity to innovate." 'There is of course one side of the industry, where India can tap a rising demand for satellite manufacturing—to simply be a direct supplier for satellites as per global specifications," Singh said. 'But, we're using this time to innovate upon the kind of surveillance resolution that we can offer—and subsequently sell the data as per sovereign requirements. We can even scale up the number of satellites that we build, depending on demand." A shot at the big bucks Data sourced from five industry executives showed that on an average, the global price of satellite surveillance data ranges from $10-100 per square kilometre per week, from a single satellite. With Indian companies also looking at similar pricing for satellite data, the revenue to be generated from an EU member such as Hungary, or a non-EU country such as Norway, as part of a bundled offering of surveillance satellite imagery and data analytics, is upward of $50 million from a constellation of high-resolution satellites. This pricing is for a surveillance area that only involves a nation's borders—contract sizes in space surveillance today run into hundreds of millions as nations generate interest to source high-resolution satellite data for various use cases. These include forestry, weather prediction, urban planning, disaster management and more. Three industry executives told Mint that for a full nation's satellite data, a single contract can cross $1 billion for a full year—underlining the business opportunity and explaining why so many private space companies are entering this field. In fact, each of the executives cited above suggested that while New Delhi is eyeing $44 billion in annual revenue from India's overall space industry by 2033, succeeding in space surveillance services around the world can single-handedly account for half of this economy. For space companies, this is key. Digantara, for instance, expects to cross $30 million in annual revenue by the next fiscal year. Ananth, already at over $30 million in annual revenue as of FY24, expects an exponential fillip due to this demand. While GalaxEye did not offer a projection, Singh said that there is 'ample scope for an exponential uptick in revenue, once our satellite is built and placed in orbit". Sensing the opportunity, the private companies are all looking to ramp-up capital expenditure and investments. Digantara, which has raised $12 million from venture capital firm Peak XV and others, is in the market for a $50 million funding round. GalaxEye, which raised $10 million from deeptech fund Speciale Invest, tech giant Infosys, and others, will also pursue a new funding round to expand its surveillance satellite offerings to various nations, after it places its first high-resolution satellite in orbit by December. Even Ananth Technologies, which has a steady revenue stream, is not opposed to a future funding round. Pavuluri said the company will 'definitely require funding to expand capacity and ramp-up production as per global demand", but did not confirm if it will pursue a public listing, or by when the funding round may take place. Catering to the world Behind each of these ventures and the entire space industry today is the fact that between 2022 and now, private space startups did not immediately find domestic avenues to scale up revenue. Last year, this prompted former Isro chief S. Somanath to state that the government had not emerged as a key customer of space services the way the US did for its private space vendors, almost three decades ago. Over the past 12 months, though, the industry has shifted upward. 'Global demand is seeing countries from Europe, Africa and the Middle East all look at India as a reliable space technology and satellite supplier," said Chaitanya Giri, space fellow at global policy think-tank, Observer Research Foundation. 'With India's stable geopolitical outlook, a sizeable economy, and the reputation that Isro enjoys globally, the domestic space market is ripe to expand globally." The US, to be sure, mostly caters only to large-scale contracts—that, too, after signing bilateral defence treaties as part of efforts to secure access to its defence infrastructure and blueprints. China, which has always been a protectionist economy, only builds for itself. With this, India sees a clear path ahead in the growth of geospatial defence services. And it all begins with startups and conglomerate-backed entities pursuing that low-hanging fruit: surveillance satellites. 'In the long run, there is deep potential for more complex and intricate engineering in the aerospace defence sector for India. For Shield, for instance, India represents a multi-year partnership agreement with the JSW Group—one that gives our US entity strong footing in one of the world's most important space economies," Shield's Shah said. Digantara's Sharma concurs. 'There is a clear need within India and across the world to build space infrastructure that is innovative, offers mapping and surveillance, and does so at a considerably more scalable and cost-efficient structure than what the rest of the world has offered," he said. 'We're here to do it, and the runway ahead for this sector is big and bright."
