In design
The 3U imaging satellite
Illustration: the 3U in orbit, wings unfolded.
A printer factory, a satellite team, an AI lab and a classroom.
Fracktal Works is the one I have run since 2013. The others are newer: I am on the founding technical team at Constellation Aerospace, and I founded Hathi Labs and Bloc42.
Founder & CEO · since June 2013
Fracktal Works
From the first Julia, built at Manipal, to an industrial SLS printer.
Rohit Asil and I started it at the Manipal Institute of Technology because our robotics team, RoboManipal, kept waiting weeks for parts. It now designs, assembles and services 3D printers in India, from desktop machines to industrial SLS.
More on Fracktal's machines and projects, including a sculpture for Mumbai airport and an industrial SLS printer built under a Ministry of Heavy Industries programme.
Founding technical team
Constellation Aerospace
Satellite image quality, built into the camera payload.
A small satellite usually gets its image quality from the platform it is bolted to. Constellation builds it into the payload. A conventional star tracker loses the sky above about three degrees a second, so an agile satellite has to turn, wait for the motion to settle, and only then take a picture. Constellation's star camera works out the spacecraft's orientation while it is still turning, and the imaging system uses that reading to line up and stack its own frames on board.
The result is a sharp, geolocated image from a satellite with ordinary pointing, and no wait between targets. Stratos-1 flew the compute module and cameras to 42 km in May 2026; Stratos-2 validates the star camera and the passive radiative cooling. The first on-board stacking flight is 2027.
The star camera is designed and built in Bengaluru and is ITAR-free, meaning US arms-export rules do not apply to it. For many of the company's customers, that is a requirement.
The company is now designing complete satellites as well. The 3U is built around imaging: a payload bay, the star camera inside the body looking out through a side window, and dedicated processors for each camera. The 1U is the simplest way to fly the star camera, with an Earth camera on the opposite deck so the same flight returns pictures. Both are in design.
Concept
The 1U star-camera demonstrator
Illustration: the 1U concept, wings deployed.
Founder
Hathi Labs
An applied-AI lab. It has made two companies so far.
Hathi Labs starts from a business problem and stays with it until the software runs in production. That has produced Metorite, which runs a company's routine work, and Applied Additive, whose RapidTool designs fixtures for the factory floor.
Hathi Labs
Metorite
Software that runs routine company work through AI agents, with a person approving anything that goes out.
In Metorite a webhook, a schedule or a signal starts the work, and an agent carries the task across departments, retrying when a step fails.
The feature I care about most is the audit trail. Every change an agent makes can be traced, and anything that would reach outside the company is blocked until a person approves it.
Hathi Labs
Applied Additive, and RapidTool
Fixtures are a hidden cost on every production line.
Jigs and fixtures hold a part still while a robot, a mill or a gauge works on it. Getting one made usually means a ticket to a CAD engineer, revisions, then a supplier, and one to four weeks before anything is held. If the part changes mid-run, the process starts again.
RapidTool Fixture takes an STL, OBJ or GLTF of the part and walks you through eight steps in the browser: it sizes the baseplate, adds supports, places toggle clamps, embosses labels, drills mounting holes and subtracts a fitted cavity for the part. You export STL or 3MF and print the fixture in-house, in under 20 minutes from import to export, without CAD.
RapidTool Shadow Box does the same for tool storage: one photo of your tools on a sheet of paper becomes a print-ready Gridfinity tray or a laser-cut shadow board. Both apps are free to start.
I spent years watching Fracktal's customers wait on fixtures before building RapidTool to cut the wait. Applied Additive is the company; RapidTool is one of its products.
Founder
Bloc42
Engineering education for people who want to build things.
Bloc42 teaches engineering the way it is practised: hands-on courses that run from the design process and CAD to 3D printing, electronics, Arduino, IoT and embedded Linux, with a community of students and mentors around them.
Its newest programme is about AI agents. In eleven videos it teaches you to build agents that do real work, with no coding, around DeskBot, a small physical AI companion that sits on your desk. The DeskBot course.
Building hardware in India? Write to me.
