Onkar Singh Batra’s journey from building his first website at age seven in Jammu to launching a space-tech startup in Silicon Valley is an unusually rapid progression.
At seven, Batra built his first website and was recognised as the world’s youngest male webmaster. At 12, he wrote a book on theoretical physics, and by 13 he had started his own company. While still a school student, he began working on InQube, a small CubeSat project described as India’s first open-source satellite.
His interest in space technology eventually led him to a problem that would shape his entrepreneurial career: satellites in low Earth orbit cannot always communicate directly with ground stations because Earth periodically blocks their line of sight. That can create communication gaps when satellites are collecting important data.
FROM WEBSITES TO SPACE TECHNOLOGY
Batra was exposed to computers from an early age through his father, who worked in IT. After building his first website at seven, he continued experimenting with technology and eventually founded Batra Technologies in 2018 and United India Publishing in 2019.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, he helped develop an online platform that connected people with doctors and provided health-related information. The initiative, developed with support from doctors at Government Medical College Jammu, earned him the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar.
His interests then increasingly shifted towards space.
While in school, Batra worked on InQube, a roughly one-kilogram 1U CubeSat designed to test satellite systems and collect temperature-related data. The project gave him practical exposure to satellite communications and highlighted the limitations of relying solely on direct communication between spacecraft and ground stations.
HE WAS ALSO WORKING WITH IIT JAMMU
Batra's school years involved several research and technology projects. His profile lists work with IIT Jammu's Satellite Development Program and an earlier research internship at its I2EDC Laboratory, where he worked on embedded systems, software-defined radio and real-time tracking.
He also worked as a visiting researcher at the CSIR–Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine on image-processing techniques and founded onXr Labs, which explored projects spanning AI, space and biology.
By 2023, he had completed school while already accumulating experience in research, engineering and entrepreneurship.
FROM JAMMU TO SILICON VALLEY
Batra later moved to the United States, completed high school in New York and briefly attended Penn State University before leaving college to pursue entrepreneurship.
In 2024, he founded Apolink, a Palo Alto-based space-tech startup focused on satellite communications.
The company's central idea is to create a relay network that can maintain connectivity with spacecraft in low Earth orbit even when those spacecraft are outside the direct line of sight of ground stations.
Apolink is developing a hybrid communications architecture involving radio-frequency and optical links. Its stated aim is to make the technology usable by existing spacecraft without requiring major modifications to customer satellites.
At 19, Batra raised $4.3 million in a seed funding round reportedly valuing the company at about $45 million post-money. Investors included Y Combinator, 468 Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Rebel Fund and others.
FROM A SCHOOL PROJECT TO ORBIT
The next major milestone came with Apolink's first technology-demonstration satellite, IPoS-TDsM.
The satellite was launched aboard SpaceX's Transporter-17 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base on July 7, 2026. After deployment, Apolink announced that it had established contact with the spacecraft.
The mission is intended to demonstrate an RF relay system that can allow existing satellites to communicate through the relay without requiring extensive hardware changes.
That makes the trajectory of Batra's career particularly striking: a seven-year-old building websites in Jammu eventually became a 20-year-old entrepreneur putting satellite-communication technology into orbit.
The more interesting question now is whether Apolink can turn that demonstration into a reliable commercial satellite-relay network—a much harder challenge than getting a first spacecraft into orbit.
