From ISRO Scientist to $25M Deep Tech Founder Prateep Basu (SatSure)

This episode with Prateep Basu, Co-founder and CEO of SatSure, is the deep-tech founder story India's startup ecosystem has been waiting for. Prateep Basu left a career building propulsion systems for India's GSLV MK-III rocket at ISRO to ask a deceptively simple question - why do urban Indians get 10 loan offers a day on WhatsApp while farmers wait a month for a single approval? The answer became SatSure, a Bengaluru-based Earth intelligence company that uses satellite imagery, AI, and government land records to deliver alternate credit scores for farmers, monitor crop health across bank portfolios, and help airports, insurers, and FMCG companies make smarter decisions from space. Bootstrapped for four and a half years before raising $25 million across multiple rounds, SatSure now monitors 1.95 lakh villages and has analysed over 2.1 million farmer plots. In this candid, wide-ranging conversation with host Akshay Datt, Prateep breaks down the physics of 40-pixel crop detection, explains why algorithms are never the moat, and reveals the strategic logic behind SatSure's audacious zero-bid for India's first private national satellite constellation. He also shares why AI is an accelerant, not a threat, for deep-tech companies that have built genuine domain depth. What you will learn in this episode: 👉How SatSure built an alternate credit score for farmers using satellite crop imagery, land boundary data, and historical yield analysis, collapsing a 30-day loan process to under 30 minutes and creating a product that banks like ICICI and IDFC are paying for at scale 👉Why Prateep believes the algorithm is never the moat, and how SatSure's real competitive advantage is the nuanced translation of banking business processes into product and model design, something no open-source GitHub repository can replicate 👉The full story of SatSure's 4.5-year bootstrap, from a letter written by a young MP in Srikakulam to winning a Gates Foundation-backed challenge and securing a five-crore purchase order from the Andhra Pradesh government, all before raising a single rupee of institutional capital 👉How India's Digital Public Infrastructure, including AgriStack, the Unified Lending Interface, and digital land records, is assembling the exact pipeline that makes SatSure's products commercially unstoppable at national scale 👉The strategic logic behind Allied Orbits, the consortium of Pixxel, SatSure, Dhruva Space, and PierSight that won India's first private satellite constellation contract, and why the consortium chose to refuse government funding in exchange for full global commercialisation rights Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

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From ISRO Scientist to $25M Deep Tech Founder Prateep Basu (SatSure) is an episode from Founder Thesis by Akshay Datt.

This episode is 95:11 long.

This episode was published on Mar 5, 2026.

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