About us
Founded in 2018, with offices in Dubai, Noordwijk, Mumbai and Hyderabad. Architects of national space programs in India, the Pacific, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean rim.
We have been building, launching and operating spacecraft as a private company since 2018 — first as Exseed Space, today as Satellize. The team, the cleanroom and the mission have been steady the whole way.
Our story
Satellize, formerly Exseed Space, was founded over many cups of chai in Hyderabad in 2017, when Mahesh Murthy and Ashhar Farhan, lifelong friends and school buddies, noticed that barely 12 countries out of 200 on earth had launched rockets to space, and barely 80 had ever sent up any satellites. They felt they had the engineering, talent and institutional history to build a private space company that could offer sovereign space capabilities to the world's nations. Especially those who either could not afford US and Europe space program costs — or for some reason did not want US, China or Russia political alignment.
From private firsts
We founded Exseed Space with a small team of veteran spacecraft, RF and avionics engineers — many of them long-time amateur-radio operators and ISRO alumni — and a borrowed garage. Within four months we had built Exseed Sat 1, India's first private satellite. SpaceX's Falcon 9 carried it to orbit in December 2018. Four months later, AISAT — Exseed Sat 2 — became the first private satellite launched from Indian soil and the world's first commercial use of ISRO's PS4 fourth-stage platform. Both satellites worked. A team out of a garage had done, in months and on a startup budget, what state programmes schedule years and ministries for.
To sovereign futures
As the geopolitical landscape fractured — denied signals, contested orbits, foreign clouds — it became clear that the more interesting work wasn't selling commercial imagery but standing up sovereign programmes. The Tonga response in 2022 made the case in the simplest possible terms. In 2024 we rebranded to Satellize to reflect that mature mission: putting full-stack orbital control — satellites, ground stations, mission control, operators — into the hands of allied nations. The team, the cleanroom and the engineering DNA have been steady the whole way.
Hyderabad · ISO Class 7 cleanroom — “We build in-house to guarantee zero supply-chain compromise. Every screw, every line of firmware, every test report — held in our own hands.”
The founders
Mahesh Murthy and Ashhar Farhan founded the company together in 2018 and have led every spacecraft, every ground station and every national program since. Mahesh also founded the outcome-based marketing firm Pinstorm and writes at maheshmurthy.com.
Strategy · National programs · Capital
Mahesh leads Satellize's national-program work, anchoring the conversations that turn a sovereign aspiration into a funded, delivered constellation. He has spent three decades at the intersection of technology, capital and Indian institutional credibility.
Engineering · Spacecraft · Mission ops
Farhan leads Satellize's engineering — bus architecture, payload integration, ground systems and mission operations. His teams have delivered every Satellize spacecraft to orbit and stood up every sovereign ground station the company has signed.
Milestones
- 2018 · Q2 — Exseed Space founded in Hyderabad by Mahesh Murthy and Ashhar Farhan; veteran spacecraft, RF and avionics engineers assembled in a borrowed garage.
- 2018 · Q4 — Exseed Sat 1 — India's first private satellite — launched on SpaceX Falcon 9 SSO-A on 03 December, joint engineering with AMSAT-India.
- 2019 · Q1 — DefExpo 2020 partnership announced; ground-segment work for the Indian Armed Forces begins.
- 2019 · Q2 — AISAT (Exseed Sat 2) — first private satellite launched from Indian soil — flown on PSLV-C45 PS4 platform with ISRO; first commercial use of the PS4 stage.
- 2020 — Hyderabad ISO Class 7 satellite integration cleanroom commissioned.
- 2020 · Q3 — GSAT-30 ground-segment support; commercial replenishment of INSAT-4A communications coverage.
- 2021 · Q1 — GSAT-31 ground-segment integration; Ku-band coverage for the Indian subcontinent.
- 2022 · Q1 — EOS-04 / RISAT-1A SAR mission delivered alongside ISRO — all-weather, day-night radar imaging.
- 2022 · Q2 — Tonga response — sovereign overhead and backbone program stood up after the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai eruption severed undersea cable.
- 2023 — SpaceShare workforce-development program launched — Indian engineering talent placed into global space-industry roles.
- 2024 — Rebrand from Exseed Space to Satellize — sovereignty as the mission, full-stack national programs as the offer.
- 2026 · Q1 — Monsoon early-warning program — Bay of Bengal cyclone-genesis observation routine ops; minutes-latency to civil defence.
Global presence
- Dubai — Dubai Digital Park, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
- Noordwijk — Kapteynstraat 1-140, 2201 BB Noordwijk, The Netherlands · +31 6 5729 9191
- Mumbai — Swati Building, North Avenue, Santa Cruz West, Mumbai 400 054, India · +91 22 6739 3888
- Hyderabad — 403, B Block, Delta Seacon, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad 500 034, India · +91 8897 234 219
Partners & mission credits
No spacecraft flies alone. Across eight years and ten missions, the institutions and teams below stood with us — on the pad, in the cleanroom, on the ground network and at the data desk. We name them because credibility is borrowed, never owned.
- Launch providers: SpaceX, ISRO / NSIL, Antrix, Arianespace
- Spacecraft heritage & integration: AMSAT-India, HF Signals, Lamakaan engineering collective, ISRO veteran cohort
- Ground segment & RF: ESA · ESTEC, Tonga Communications Corporation, Indian Armed Forces ground partners (DefExpo 2020)
- Sovereign clients & national authorities: Government of Tonga
- Workforce & capacity: SpaceShare alumni, Indian aerospace academia, Operator-training cohorts on three continents
Eight years. Ten missions. One mission control room. The same engineers who shipped Exseed Sat 1 are the ones writing tasking files tonight.