Meet Ram Shriram, the Google Backer Betting Big on Skyroot Aerospace

Ram Shriram, one of the first investors in Google, is leading a $60 million funding round in Skyroot Aerospace. This would make the Hyderabad based company India’s first space-tech unicorn crossing a valuation of $1.1 billion.

Apart from the Shriram led Sherpalo Investments, other investors such as Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, investment giants BlackRock, the founders of renewable energy company Greenko Group, Arkam Ventures, Playbook Partners, and the Shanghvi Family Office also participated in the fresh funding round.

Sherpalo and Skyroot share a longstanding relationship, with the venture firm leading a $4.5 million bridge round for Skyroot in January, 2022. In the same year, Sherpalo also participated in a $51 million Series B funding round led by GIC.

Who Is Ram Shriram?

Shriram, an Indian-born American billionaire was among Google’s earliest investors and served as one of the company’s founding board members.

Born in Madras, now Chennai, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Loyola College under University of Madras. He started his career at Bell-Northern Research, moving to Netscape as vice president in 1994, and later served as president of Junglee, an online comparison-shopping firm.

In 1998, Amazon acquired Junglee which led to Shriram serving as Vice President of Business at Amazon.

Shriram founded Sherpalo Investments in January, 2000 and has since invested in more than 50 technology firms across sectors such as fintech, space tech, biotech, artificial intelligence, and others.

In 2008 and 2009, Ram was ranked number three on the Forbes list of top tech dealmakers.

Skyroot Aerospace

Skyroot was founded by space scientists-turned-entrepreneurs Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka in 2018. Their vision is to make space travel more accessible and routine by removing long delays and steep costs faced by satellite operators. Thus, providing on-demand satellite launch services while prioritizing low-cost launch vehicles.

The startup achieved multiple firsts in India’s private space sector, including the country’s first static fire test of a privately built rocket engine, Raman-1, test firing India’s first privately built cryogenic engine, Dhawan-1, and in 2022 successfully launching India's first private rocket, Vikram-S. It was a suborbital rocket.

Skyroot is now preparing to launch Vikram-I, India’s first private orbital rocket. While Vikram-II with a larger payload capacity is under development.