In a three-room laboratory in north Bengaluru, a small black box measuring two by two feet simulates the space environment. This is the play lab for Gimbal Space’s optical engineer Zubin Jacob, who experiments with a star tracker inside it. Jacob is in his 20s and this is his first job after college. The star tracker is a funnel-shaped camera supported by an algorithm. It is shaped like a small pot and instructs the spacecraft where to go to perform its task.
A star tracker looks like a simple design, but it has extensive electrical, mechanical, optical and software functions that can map space and direct a satellite to look at a fixed point. “This is one of the first India-made star trackers,” says Dhaval Shiyani, Founder and CEO, Gimbal Space, the excitement evident in his voice.
Although the star tracker is not yet commercial, Gimbal Space has created a reaction wheel and magnetotracker to sell. All three are part of what satellite manufacturers call the attitude determination and control system (ADCS), an essential sub-system in space technology that keeps a spacecraft oriented and stable. Shiani tells us that it is somewhat like a steering wheel in its basic form or the brain in its most sophisticated form. ADCS instructs a satellite to point its antenna at a ground station, aim its camera at a specific city, or tilt its solar panels toward the sun.
Any ADCS system consists of a combination of hardware and software and Gimbal is building both stacks from scratch. Star trackers are cameras that capture star fields and use them to align the satellite; Sun sensors detect the Sun, while Earth horizon sensors detect the curve of the Earth to orient a spacecraft. Then there are magnetars that map the Earth’s magnetic field and use gyroscopes to track the angular rotation of the spacecraft. Software on board takes input from these sensors, processes it on the in-built ADCS motherboard (which the startup is also building) and instructs reaction wheels – which are like rotating flywheels – to rotate the spacecraft in a certain direction.
In the mechanical laboratory across from the star tracker room, there is a 3D printer, ultrasonic cleaner, and spools of copper wire. On the work table is the gimbal’s new generation magnetorcher which looks like a small spool of copper coil. “We’re sending all these ADCS components on our own satellite in late 2026,” explains Shiani, who shows us the startup’s new generation Reaction Wheel, a compact 300-gram dice-sized cube. After all, weight matters in space.
building lego blocks for space
Subsystems such as ADCS have always been essential for the millions of dollars of equipment in orbit. Older players such as Lockheed Martin, Airbus and Honeywell build large-scale, long-endurance, specialized ADCS systems for large military, government and deep space missions.
This is not the market the gimbal space is aimed at. The startup is considering commercial satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Instead of huge, expensive geostationary satellites that operate for 20–30 years, commercial operators are shifting to cheap, replaceable smallsats that are compact, lightweight spacecraft weighing between 50–500 kg and operating for about 5–7 years. These satellites are used by the thousands by mega-constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink or Amazon’s LEO.
Gimbal Space is building ready-to-use, low-cost, off-the-shelf ADCS for these constellations. “Our goal is to have an Amazon-like platform for ADCS components that can be delivered to your door in a few weeks and offer you high-volume components at low prices,” says Shiani. His team keeps costs down by using industrial hardware that doesn’t need to work for more than seven years, so they don’t need to build with hard-to-obtain, expensive radiation hardware. This makes it cheaper and faster for them to produce.
“You can fly new hardware for these constellations very quickly,” he says, adding that his customers are small startups or academics who want to fly satellites in space, but don’t need expensive ADCS for their work.
floating between two continents
The glass windows of Gimble Space’s lab look out onto a park dotted with tall eucalyptus trees and an open gym where retired Bengaluruans swing vigorously. Shiyani, who is from Mumbai, moved to Bengaluru in 2024 in search of another location for his startup and fell in love with this office, perhaps because it was somewhat similar to his office in Silicon Valley, America.
An avid technocrat, Shiani loves science fiction and has always wanted to work on the space frontier. As an aerospace engineer in the United States, he participated in the first Hyperloop competition in 2016 and raised a few hundred dollars. When he couldn’t join SpaceX after graduation because he had Indian citizenship, he worked at Tesla, designing automation on the factory floor for Tesla’s Model 3. From there he moved to Apollo Fusion and then Astra to work on rockets.
When the cost of commercial satellite launches began to decline due to SpaceX rideshare, Shiani noticed that the hardware supply chain in space technology was slow and prohibitively expensive. “If we want to put millions of satellites in space, we can’t do old-fashioned satellite development,” he explains. He left his job in 2023, bootstrapped the Gimbal space, and raised a seed round of $1.2 million in August 2024. With this, they opened two offices – one in Union City, California, US and the other in Bengaluru opposite the park. “There is a lot of scope for industrialization and re-innovation in this region,” says Shiani.
Gimbal Space currently has about 25 employees, some of whom are contractors, based in both cities. Shiani, who is 35, describes the company as a US-based Indian subsidiary. While indigenous technology and sovereign technology have become a real challenge for businesses, the legal presence on two continents allows Xiani to be flexible to supply globally, no matter the geopolitical situation or policies. He immediately says that he will not work with China. “We will never, never, never supply to China,” he explains, surprisingly adamant and says that his global supply means countries other than China.
Being on two continents also helps in getting the best customers, technical expertise, guidance and hardware. For example, although it is cheaper to conduct research and development in India, the US has a more mature used-equipment market to obtain affordable equipment for space technology.
“India is one of the few countries that can manufacture space hardware to match global demand,” says Shiani. However, he feels his employees of 20 years also need the encouragement and confidence to know that they can redesign and reinvent space technology. He says, “Everyone is human and they create technology to the best of their ability at the time. But technology created by technology can easily be improved.” “Think from first principles, know your field and question everything. That’s how innovation happens.”
Shiani’s confidence has infected the 20 people he has hired straight from engineering colleges. This is what it takes to build a startup that will supply cheap satellite components.
space industrialization is here
According to data from Research & Markets, this market is projected to grow from approximately $3.4 billion in 2025 to $8 billion in 2030, at a CAGR of 18%. It’s a big market but it’s quickly becoming a crowded market. Gimbal Space is one of 150 startups around the world attempting to create components for smallsats. But they are confident. After all, space industrialization, Shiani tells us, is a given.
One thing the gimbal space lacks is legacy – proof that their components work well in space. To this end, he shows us an ISO-7-compliant clean-room installed in his office, which will house the startup’s Helmholtz cage. The cage is a laboratory device containing electromagnetic coils that simulate the zero-gravity magnetic environment of space. Shiani will build a smaller CubeSat, a satellite weighing about 2-3 kilograms, add components it has made and fly them on a Falcon 9 by the end of the year.
By 2026, Shiani wants to create its own marketplace that will sell tested battery packs, onboard computers and ADCS components such as computers, star trackers, magnetorhes and reaction wheels to satellite startups. In the future, Shiani wants to offer all aspects of a satellite bus, so an institution or startup that wants to send a satellite into space can order all the structural components except its payload and have it flying in a month or two. “That’s our mission,” says Shiani, “globally, except in China.
