Cosmochute has raised $1.5 million in its first pre-seed round to build robots for the Moon. The Ahmedabad based space robotics startup announced the funding on October 15, with Accel and Prosus Ventures leading the round through Atoms X, their joint early stage programme for frontier science startups.
IIMA Ventures Deep-tech and Aerospace fund, Operators Studio, and angel investor Chinmayi Muthyala also participated. Under the Atoms X structure, Prosus matches Accel’s cheque, giving the young company two heavyweight backers from day one.
Founders Janhavi Gore, Amit Chowdhary, and Dhruv Alok Sangal started Cosmochute in 2026 with an unusually ambitious goal. Infrastructure for a working lunar economy.
A rover designed like infrastructure, not a one-off mission
The money will build LEAP, Cosmochute’s first platform. It is a rover and trailer with standard payload bays designed to carry equipment across the lunar surface.
The insight behind it is simple. Today, getting equipment onto the Moon means building custom hardware for every mission. Standardized parts would make Moon missions cheaper and easier to repeat, the same way standard shipping containers transformed logistics on Earth.
Beyond LEAP, the funding covers new engineering hires and lunar labs at the IIMA Ventures campus in Ahmedabad. Guiding the science is Mylswamy Annadurai, the former programme director of India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission, who has joined as chief scientist.
“Space 1.0 was ISRO proving India could reach orbit. Space 2.0 made orbit commercial: cheaper, more frequent, and open to private capital.”
Janhavi Gore, Co-founder, Cosmochute
Why Accel and Prosus are betting on the Moon
This round says as much about investor appetite as it does about Cosmochute. A pre-revenue startup founded months ago just raised institutional capital for a multi-year deep tech bet. That only happens when investors believe the category has arrived.
The timing supports that read. In the same week, Skyroot Aerospace signed a two-launch deal with a US startup to put sunlight-beaming mirrors in orbit. India’s private space sector is moving from promise to contracts, and Atoms X exists precisely to catch frontier science teams early.
The risk is execution. Lunar hardware has brutal timelines, and LEAP is still a concept moving toward its first test milestones. But with a Chandrayaan veteran guiding the science and two top-tier firms sharing the cheque, Cosmochute has bought itself the rarest thing in space startups. Time.
Watch whether the LEAP rover reaches a test milestone through 2027. That is when this bet starts getting marked to reality.
