AHMEDABAD: Satleo Labs, a space start-up based in Bodakdev, Ahmedabad, says it wants to sell temperature as a data product, mapped from orbit. The company's website describes a thermal imaging service built around a constellation of microsatellites, and its first instrument, TAPAS-1, has just gone to space as a hosted payload. This explainer covers what the company says it does, using only its own pages.
What Satleo says it builds
Most Earth observation companies work in visible light. Satleo works in heat. It says it captures imagery across mid-wave infrared, long-wave infrared and visible bands, and that it can capture temperature variations within 1 degree Kelvin. The company calls this precision temperature mapping and pitches it for climate research, disaster preparedness and environmental monitoring.
The plan, as described, has a hardware side and a software side. The hardware is a network of low Earth orbit microsatellites for continuous thermal monitoring. The software is a set of machine learning models that turn raw brightness temperature readings into predictions. Satleo also talks about space edge computing, meaning analysis done on board the satellite so that less data needs to be sent down to the ground.
The website lists use cases that include agriculture, climate modelling, weather forecasting, renewable energy, natural disaster management, environmental conservation, archaeology and geology, and urban planning. In farming, for example, it talks about spotting crop stress and irrigation needs. In cities, it talks about finding heat islands. These are intended applications, and the pages reviewed do not name paying customers.
The founders and the timeline
The About page names three founders. Shravan Singh Bhati is chief executive, with what the company calls a 16-plus year journey in satellite-based innovation. Dr Ranendu Ghosh is chief technology officer, with 27 years at ISRO working on satellite payloads for agriculture, hydrology and soil sciences. Urmil Bakhai is chief strategy officer, with more than 22 years in sales leadership.
The company's own timeline starts in 2019, when a gap in temperature data during an agricultural project sparked the idea. The founders came together in 2022, research and partnerships began in 2023, and sensor and data framework development ran through 2024. The page says its first microsatellites were ready for deployment by 2026.
TAPAS-1 and what it adds
Satleo's home page showed a countdown for the TAPAS-1 satellite launch mission on 1 October 2026. Dhruva Space, the satellite maker that built the LEAP-2 platform, lists TAPAS-1 as a thermal imager by Satleo Labs on its LEAP-2 mission, with long-wave infrared sensing for thermal data acquisition. Dhruva says LEAP-2 launched on Transporter-18 and was deployed into orbit in the early hours of 2 October 2026.
That puts Satleo at an early stage of flight experience, even though the company has worked on the idea since 2019. A hosted payload on someone else's satellite is a demonstration, and the company has not published, on the pages reviewed, any imagery from TAPAS-1, any performance results, funding figures or a date for its own constellation.
For readers who want to check the details, Satleo lists its office at 501 and 502, Silver Radiance, Sindhu Bhavan Marg, Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Dalimss News has not independently verified the technical claims.
