By Tunir Biswas
When Shravan Bhati was working on implementing a high-stakes agricultural project in 2019, he and his colleagues found that the temperature data available to them was inaccurate. He decided to bring this to the attention of Ranendu Ghosh, a former ISRO scientist, who was heading the committee appointed by the Gujarat state government to look over the project Bhati’s company was implementing.
“Temperature played a 35% role in the weightage of the model we were testing. I was under the impression that we had incorrect figures but Ranendu explained that the Indian Meteorological Department was actually estimating temperature data by interpolating the IoT devices,” Bhati says.
The duo discussed some alternatives, but scalability was a recurring issue. They soon realised that the right data would only be available if they assessed it through space.
That realisation eventually led to the founding of SatLeo Labs in 2023. Its founding team includes CEO and Co-founder Bhati, CTO and Co-founder Ghosh and CSO, and Co-founder and Director Urmil Bakhai—Bhati’s colleague and a member of that agricultural project team. The spacetech startup uses thermal imaging to get high-resolution and high-cadence data.
With over 20 employees, the Ahmedabad-based startup has two offices and a war room very close to In-SPACe Headquarters, where it is incubated.
Refining thermal data
Bhati and Ghosh realised the versatility of having accurate temperature data when they were brainstorming.
“We realised this will not only help in the agricultural sector, but it can actually identify greenhouse gases,” Bhati says.
Accurate thermal data can help in multiple sectors: from detecting buried structures in archaeology and disaster management to mapping urban heat islands in any metropolis.
SatLeo Labs is at present building its satellite, which is crucial for advanced thermal detection. The satellite is scheduled to launch by Q1 2026.
“Our satellite, once launched into space, will capture data via two cameras. The thermal camera will capture mid-wave infrared and long-wave infrared (segments of the infrared spectrum used in thermal imaging for very different purposes) in high definition,” Bhati says.
The second camera will capture visual scenes. This hybrid data will reach cloud servers where SaltLeo Labs’ innovative AI tools (under development for two years now) will refine and clean it before it can be used across various sectors.
Available thermal data in India has problems related to quality and frequency. That is what the founders believe SatLeo Labs will solve.
“Thermal data is available but a lot of the spatial resolution is coarse. The sensors are also not equipped for temporal resolution, which means we don’t receive it frequently. The current thermal data, at a 300-metre resolution, is available once every 18-21 days,” says Bakhai, adding that SatLeo Labs’ satellites would be able to harness thermal data at a sub-10-metre resolution twice a day, making it “much more useful and insightful”.
Real world applications
SatLeo Labs is conducting thermal mapping of Tumakuru city, and a targeted monitoring of a 40-acre unmanaged waste dump there to identify urban heat islands, detect hazardous greenhouse gases like methane, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. This is their first pilot project—a year-long collaborative project with the Tumakuru City Corporation—and the mapping is conducted via drones.
“The central government has advised municipalities to monitor air pollutants around solid waste dumps, but many have not conducted them due to lack of technology. We are monitoring and giving them reports,” says Bakhai, adding that the company is also in talks with municipalities of cities with high population density to provide them with zone-wise temperature information.
The startup has signed an MoU with the Rajasthan government for an undisclosed project. It is also working with an agritech giant to map farmland temperature variations and optimise resource usage through high-precision thermal monitoring.
SaltLeo Labs is also in the process of launching a new solution termed Thermal Comfort soon. “If you use any map applications, you receive two kinds of information: the time that a journey will take and the traffic conditions of the roads leading there. We are introducing thermal comfort as a feature that will reveal the thermal conditions of particular areas. We are closely working with our customers in the Middle East to solve this problem,” Bhati says.
The feature will be introduced in India as well and will be made available through Application Programming Interfaces—allowing seamless integration into third-party applications.
Expanding on the Middle East segment, the company is in talks with Dubai Municipality and with undisclosed bodies in Saudi Arabia to solve heat island problems in the respective countries.
On the hardware front, Satleo Labs is planning to conduct two missions: an experimental mission and the main mission. In the experimental mission, they will launch a miniature satellite (compared to the 130-150kg main satellite) in Q1 2026 that will go to outer space and capture thermal data to solve agricultural problems involving early-stage detection of water stress and disease in broad-acre crops, especially in regions prone to heat stress and inefficient irrigation.
“While the resolution of images in the experimental mission will not be as high as our main mission’s, it will still be more refined compared to many other companies in our sector,” he says. The mission is scheduled for later this year.
The main mission is scheduled for Q4 2026 and will kickstart the startup’s commercial data services across core verticals like urban cooling, agriculture and energy. The company is talking to ISRO for its launch.
Benefits of IN-SPACe incubation
Bhati believes a major reason that India’s spacetech sector has relatively fewer players is because of the expensive early stage. But incubating at IN-SPACe has proved to be a great benefit.
“If you own a spacetech company, the facility itself will cost around Rs 15-20 crore and you will have to raise funding just to get started. With IN-SPACe supporting us, we were able to bypass that problem completely as the facilities were already available. Funds were not limited to Rs 15-20 crore either. They also provide people during testing and the expert-led environment is a major advantage,” he says.
For technologies not available at the relatively new IN-SPACe, the startup heads to Space Applications Centre: ISRO Bopal Technical Campus, where the Indian government, through IN-SPACe, provides the company the opportunity to rent required facilities.
SatLeo recently raised $3.3 million in pre-seed funding and is looking to expand its team. “We are always looking for bright minds. We are presently looking to recruit people who have expertise in physics and data science, a fairly rare combination,” Bhati says.
(Edited by Jyoti Narayan)