India, July 27 -- When Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) PSLV-C61 rocket lifted off from Sriharikota in January this year, Ronak Samantray believed that the hardest part was behind him.

For nearly three years, his team at TakeMe2Space had been building towards that moment. The Hyderabad-based startup had developed a satellite carrying an NVIDIA GPU, hoping to demonstrate that AI models could process satellite imagery in orbit instead of transmitting vast amounts of raw data back to Earth for analysis.

It was an important mission for the startup to convince both customers and investors that computing in space had moved beyond a niche research project to become a commercially viable layer for compute infrastructure.

But the roc...