Apolink, a Y Combinator-backed space-tech startup founded by a 19-year-old Indian-origin entrepreneur, has raised $4.3 million in an “oversubscribed” seed round at a $45 million post-money valuation to build a real-time connectivity network for satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).
The startup is tackling a persistent problem in space communications. Satellites frequently go offline during parts of their orbit due to dead zones — periods when they are not in the line of sight of a ground station. While relay satellites and global ground station networks help reduce this downtime, they only provide partial solutions.
That gap has become critical as the space industry evolves. For years, NASA relied on its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system to maintain near-continuous contact with satellites in geostationary orbit. But in 2022, the agency announced it would gradually phase out TDRS and transition to commercial providers for satellite communications. Most of these commercial systems still focus on geostationary or medium Earth orbits. Apolink, formerly known as Bifrost Orbital, aims to change that by providing 24/7 connectivity to LEO satellites — with each orbital ring designed to handle 256 users at 9.6kbps.
“LEO has its own advantages,” said Apolink founder Onkar Singh Batra in an exclusive interview. “It’s much closer than geostationary orbit, which means closing the link between the customer satellite and our constellation is way easier… that’s where you make the power requirements limited, and that’s where the compatibility comes in as well.”
Apolink’s approach stems from Batra’s early recognition of this connectivity challenge. At the age of 14 in 2020, he developed an interest in space. In 2022, when he was in 12th grade at a defense school in the northern Indian city of Jammu, he created a satellite system named InQube, which emerged as India’s first open source satellite. He also taught space ecosystems to engineering students as a guest professor at IIT Jammu between 2022-23.
Apolink team, with …