Bengaluru: Indian space startup TakeMe2Space will launch what it calls India's first orbital computing satellite on October 1 aboard a SpaceX rocket. The MOI-1A spacecraft will fly on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission.

The sub-50 kg satellite carries Nvidia Orin NX edge-computing processors. Instead of beaming raw Earth-observation data to the ground, customers can upload containerised AI models to the satellite, which processes data as it passes over a target area and transmits only the analysis back to Earth.

The Hyderabad-based startup, founded in 2024 by Ronak Kumar Samantray, has signed 23 customers spanning agriculture, mining, supply-chain management and insurance. US-based Little Place Labs is among them.

'The reduction in the cost of not downloading it offsets the premium they pay for compute in orbit,' Samantray told Reuters. The company raised $5 million in January 2026 led by Chiratae Ventures. Its predecessor satellite, MOI-1, was lost after a launch-vehicle third-stage failure, making this a comeback mission.