How Prateep Basu and SatSure Are Turning Satellite Pixels Into Farm Loans
From ISRO rocket scientist to Earth intelligence entrepreneur, Prateep Basu built SatSure to solve a problem banks didn't know satellites could fix.
Somewhere above a paddy field in Uttar Pradesh, a satellite the size of a microwave oven is staring down at 40 pixels of farmland. Those 40 pixels, refreshed every five days, know more about a farmer’s creditworthiness than any bank manager who has ever visited him.
This is not a future projection. It is already happening, at scale, inside the credit pipelines of India’s largest private banks.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The man who built this system is Prateep Basu, Co-founder and CEO of SatSure, a Bengaluru-based Earth intelligence company at the intersection of satellite imagery, artificial intelligence, and financial infrastructure. SatSure has raised approximately $27.7 million across 12 rounds, counts ICICI Bank, HDFC Ltd, and Kotak Mahindra Bank among its investors, and is currently valued at approximately Rs. 512 crore. Its flagship platform, SatSure Sage, has analyzed over 2.1 million farmer plots across 1.95 lakh villages in India.
The numbers matter. But the origin story matters more.
The Problem Nobody Had Framed Correctly
Before SatSure, getting a loan as a farmer required a physical visit to the land, third-party ownership verification, a manual crop assessment, and a credit officer with enough agricultural knowledge to decide. The process took 30 days. For urban borrowers, banks were competing to offer pre-approved loans by WhatsApp.
People like you and me get WhatsApp messages ten times a day from banks about loan eligibility. Why can’t that exist for farmers? That was the gap we were filling.
Prateep came to this problem from an unusual direction. He spent his early career as a propulsion systems engineer at ISRO, working on the GSLV MK-III. After a Master’s at the International Space University in Strasbourg, he joined Northern Sky Research, a Boston-based consultancy advising global aerospace investors. There, he identified what he calls the industry’s core problem.
The industry was supply-centric, not demand-centric. People were launching satellites without knowing precisely what problems they were solving, because whatever happened, defense would buy something out of it.
He returned to India in 2017 and co-founded SatSure with Abhishek Raju and Rashmit Singh Sukhmani. Their first pilot was in Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, made possible by a letter of introduction from local MP Ram Mohan Naidu to the district collector. That letter came without money. It came with access, to farmers, agricultural scientists, and the texture of how rural credit actually worked. Naidu is today India’s Union Minister of Civil Aviation.
By late 2017, SatSure had won the AP AgTech Summit challenge, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and secured a Rs. 5 crore purchase order from the Andhra Pradesh government. Prateep and his co-founders then bootstrapped for four and a half years before raising their first institutional round.
What 40 Pixels Know That a Bank Manager Doesn’t
The technical question at the center of SatSure’s model is simple on its surface: can a satellite identify a specific crop on a one-acre plot?
The answer involves physics that goes well beyond what any human eye can detect. Each pixel in a multispectral satellite image carries 13 bands of spectral information, including near-infrared and short-wave infrared wavelengths that measure chlorophyll content, soil moisture, and crop stress. The same 40 pixels are re-imaged every five days, building a time series that reconstructs multiple growing seasons from a single screen.
Risk is all about history. You cannot send a drone back in time to collect data. That is the unique value of satellite imagery.
This time-machine effect is what makes the data genuinely useful for credit assessment. Prateep’s team combines crop identification with market pricing data, minimum support prices, and cost-of-cultivation benchmarks per crop per hectare to construct a season-by-season income estimate for each farmer. That feeds into an alternate credit score.
The result: a loan approval process cut from 30 days to 10 to 30 minutes, with auto-approval thresholds set by the banks themselves.
Getting to 90 to 95 percent crop identification accuracy in India required far more work than in markets like the US, where farms are large and uniform. Indian agriculture is fragmented, with adjacent plots often growing different crops. Prateep built SatSure’s training dataset through statistical field sampling and data-barter arrangements with early banking partners, accumulating approximately 300,000 ground-truth data points across major lending states.
With 40 pixels and 13 spectral bands per timestamp, re-imaged every five days, you end up with incredibly dense information. That is the secret sauce.
One Stack, Three Markets, and a Bet on Sovereignty
SatSure’s product architecture reflects a deliberate decision to maximize return on a single data infrastructure. The same satellite stack powering farm credit scoring also drives SatSure Skies, which helps the Airport Authority of India automate airspace cartography that previously took months, and SatSure Sparta, which helps FMCG companies and global banks prove their commodity supply chains are not sourced from recently deforested land, a compliance requirement under the EU Deforestation Regulation.
The product is everything that happens behind the client interface. The data models, the reusable infrastructure, the algorithms. The thin client layer for the end user? That is the consulting part.
The company’s most consequential move, however, is upstream. In 2022, Prateep launched KaleidEO, a subsidiary developing proprietary satellite payloads planned for Very Low Earth Orbit at approximately 380 km altitude. In 2025, SatSure joined the Allied Orbits consortium alongside Pixxel, Dhruva Space, and PierSight, winning an IN-SPACe contract to build India’s first privately led national Earth observation constellation, a 12-satellite system representing a Rs. 1,200 crore investment. The consortium declined up to Rs. 350 crore in government viability gap funding, choosing to self-fund in exchange for global commercialization rights.
The logic is direct. India currently spends approximately Rs. 800 crore annually buying satellite imagery from foreign companies. Prateep’s argument is that controlling the camera in orbit is the only way to control the economics and the continuity of the business underneath it.
In February 2026, Prateep was named one of the Top 10 Global Innovators at the India AI Impact Summit for SatSure’s work in satellite-based credit scoring, a recognition that places a quiet, technically grounded company at the center of a market the global satellite EO industry values at $13.2 billion today, growing to $19.6 billion by 2030.
Forty pixels. Five hundred kilometers up. Every five days. It turns out that is enough.
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