Aviation tech startup Team Indus ropes in Nandan Nilekani as an investor, advisor

Bangalore-based Axiom Research Labs Pvt Ltd, the company behind aviation technology venture Team Indus, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Infosys co-founder and the man behind UIDAI Nandan Nilekani, according to a report in The Economic Times. Nilekani will also be involved with the firm as an advisor.

Team Indus, India's lone entrant to the prestigious $30-million Google Lunar XPrize, is set to close a pre-Series A funding round of nearly $1.5 million (about Rs 9 crore) from investors, including Nilekani, the report said.

In January, the company won $1 million (Rs 6.15 crore) from Google Lunar XPRIZE, a global competition to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration.

It was one among three winners of the nine winners and one of the three in the 'Landing' sub category.

It also was India's only entry for the competition and was selected to compete for both Landing and Imaging sub categories.

The company was founded in February 2011 by an IIT-ians Rahul Narayan and Indranil Chakraborty. While Narayan has previously been a country manager at Agnicient Consulting and chief executive at IdeActive Consulting, Chakraborty has worked at Cynosure Media, Ideactive Consulting and Recrich Consulting.

It earlier raised seed capital from a group of investors including Subrata Mitra and Shekhar Kirani of Accel Partners, Sharad Sharma, the founding member of software products thinktank Ispirt, Vivek Raghavan, chief product manager of UIDAI, among others.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)