Ashwin Mahavadi Returns to Campus to Talk Space

Days after Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-I became India's first private orbital launch, Ashwin Mahavadi, SVP of Growth at Skyroot, came to IIT Guwahati, his alma mater, to talk to students about what it takes to build deep tech, and why the next decade in space looks promising for India.

Published 30 July 2026 | Office Dean of ACIR | Category Guest Lectures

IIT Guwahati hosted Ashwin Mahavadi (BTech, Civil Engineering, Batch of 2009), Senior Vice President, Skyroot Aerospace, for a talk during Orientation Week. This was just days after Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-I rocket had reached orbit. The launch made headlines nationally, drew a congratulatory call from the Prime Minister, and placed Skyroot among a very small club of private companies anywhere in the world with the capability to reach space. But what made this moment significant went beyond the headlines.

For IIT Guwahati, it was an important moment to have one of its alumni back on campus, to give the new batch joining the institute a bird's-eye view of India's growing space economy, the country's broader deep tech ambitions and what it could mean for them.

Why Does Vikram-I's Launch Matter?

"Space is hard," said Ashwin, "and rockets are one of the hardest engineering problems that humanity as a whole has solved."

Ashwin put Skyroot's achievement in context. Space breaks down into three layers: upstream (rockets), midstream (satellites), and downstream (data-driven applications). While most of the economic value sits downstream, the real bottleneck is upstream. Very few companies anywhere can reliably get a payload to orbit. 

"Even now, there's probably no more than ten nations which have a meaningful space programme. But to develop that capability in a private company is a completely different milestone altogether," he said.

Ashwin went on to make the distinction between the roles played by government agencies like ISRO and private companies like Skyroot.

Government agencies, he argued, have a mandate for science and capability-building, not for extracting commercial returns. Private companies exist to identify and go after that opportunity — which is why an open, competitive private space sector matters as much as any individual technical milestone. 

With Vikram-I, Skyroot became only the third private company in the world with a meaningful orbital launch capability, added Ashwin.  That achievement is even more striking given how quickly it happened.

The Secret Sauce: Veterans and a Hungry Young Team 

Mainstream media reported that the average age of employees at Skyroot was 28. The success of Vikram-I was the success of a very young team. Incorporated in 2018, Skyroot reached the launch pad in eight years. This is faster than several international competitors with far more funding.

When asked about the reasons behind this speed and success, Ashwin said that Skyroot benefited from a specific combination: around a dozen retired ISRO experts were mentoring a young engineering team that was eager to prove itself. This pairing of institutional memory and hunger paid big dividends for the company. 

And while Skyroot took no direct technology transfer from ISRO, the company benefited from the space capability built over decades of ISRO missions. India had a vendor ecosystem, a base of engineers who spent decades in government space programmes, and a national reservoir of hands-on expertise that private companies could draw on.

This also explains how India's private space sector, which is only five years old, has roughly 400 companies building rockets, satellites, and downstream applications.

Space as a National Asset

Despite the conversation about economic opportunity, Ashwin was clear that Vikram-I's launch is a milestone with implications well beyond one company's balance sheet.

Space is increasingly a strategic asset tied to critical civilian infrastructure like broadband connectivity in hard-to-reach terrain and the future of AI data centres. Ashwin said that compute-hungry, power-constrained data centres are already looking towards orbit as a possible home.

In addition, space is also becoming a critical part of national security through real-time defence and surveillance capability. During his talk, Ashwin mentioned that China operates more than a hundred satellites focused on surveillance alone, and global initiatives like the U.S.'s $200-billion Golden Dome missile defence program show that space has become critical to modern warfare. He implied that private launch capability is increasingly a matter of national and economic sovereignty. 

Advice for BTech Students: "Build More" 

Space is precisely the kind of high-stakes, technically demanding problem that needs a pipeline of capable engineers. And for the room full of new BTech students, Ashwin's central piece of advice was simple: build more.

Frontier technology, he said, increasingly sits at the intersection of multiple disciplines. "An aerodynamics engineer at Skyroot writes his own code; an embedded software engineer does his coding but also works on hardware design," he explained.

Ashwin's advice was to pair depth in one discipline with a working knowledge of engineering principles across others. That combination, he said, is what builds real systems engineering capability. "That's what we look for when we are interviewing people... the ability to think at a system level but still own an individual problem."

He encouraged students to take advantage of interdisciplinary clubs and industry-linked competitions on campus, arguing that applying classroom principles hands-on is the fastest way to internalise the trade-offs that separate good engineers from great ones. 

Where are the Opportunities of the Future?

Ashwin's broader message extended beyond space and beyond advice for individual students. He spoke about where the country as a whole stood. India, he argued, has all the ingredients for deep tech leadership across multiple sectors: skilled manpower, increasing policy support, and available capital.

Ashwin framed Skyroot's success as validation for both investors and engineers to have the confidence to bet on similarly ambitious, long-gestation technology problems. 

It was, fittingly, a talk less about rockets than about the kind of ecosystem it takes to build them — and a reminder to the students in the room that the next chapter of India's deep tech story could be theirs to write.