Jainul Abedin's rocket dreams are taking off

The 25-year-old CEO of Abyom has turned his childhood dream into a business venture

By Samreen Wani

Last Updated: Jan 09, 2026, 13:49 IST2 min

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Jainul Abedin, Founder & CEO, Abyom. Photo by Madhu Kapparath

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Jainul Abedin (25)
Founder & CEO, Abyom SpaceTech and Defence

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Jainul Abedin wants to be an astronaut someday. He is quite certain about that. What he is also certain about is that when he does finally go to space, it won’t be aboard a single-use rocket.

The 25-year-old has always dreamt about exploring the vast expanse of the universe. As it happens so often, conventional career paths fail to sustain these childhood dreams. But not for Abedin. The only difference is that he made his childhood aspirations his business venture.

Although his small village in Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh, provided everything—from friends and family, a good school and even the occasional inter-village cricket match—the founder and CEO of Abyom says it offered no such resource to fulfil his space aspirations.

While completing his education, including a stint in Kolkata, Abedin began researching the space industry in 2016. A pivotal moment occurred in the Class 9, when he learnt about Dr Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, whose name resonated with his own, sparking his ambition to do “something new” beyond the engineering path pursued by his batchmates.

Abedin focussed intensely on academics to earn a national fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology and immediately used the entire amount to fund the initial research and team-building for his startup idea. Through his research, Abedin identified a crucial gap in the sector—the lack of reusable rocket technology in India, despite the work of global companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX. The industry’s prohibitive cost, driven primarily by single-use rockets, created the biggest barrier to entry and inflated the entire supply chain. He decided to tackle this cost barrier by building his own reusable rocket, leading to the founding of Abyom in 2020.

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And this “crazy idea” was cemented when the government finally opened the space sector to private investment and invited him, as one of four young minds, to discuss the future of the sector with the ISRO Chairman and a panel of experts. Abedin lives by the belief that “whatever we imagine in our mind becomes a reality one day”.

Abyom’s focus on a reusable launch vehicle inherently presents unique obstacles. Fundraising is difficult, often involving significant delays and inconsistent approaches from different investors. “Sometimes, the terms are signed but the investment gets delayed. Sometimes, they delay for 6-8 months,” Abedin says. However, despite navigating investment hurdles, the startup employs 15 people today.

But the startup’s biggest challenge in 2022 was finding a facility to test rocket engines. They solved this by creating a compact, plug-and-play 20-foot container test facility. This benchmark innovation is now being commercialised with government funding due to demand from institutions seeking to replicate it.

In the five years since its inception, Abyom has evolved, as has Abedin. Recognising that growth requires more than just technical expertise, he immersed himself in finance, legal, and recruitment matters. The current priority is to hire experts in various domains to free up time for critical investment fundraising. He feels he must now balance his role as the public face of the company while maintaining hands-on involvement with technical progress. His immediate focus now is “commercialisation of technology”.

Even with R&D and investment occupying most of his time, his astronaut dream remains intact: “In the future, more people will venture into space and there will be a small contribution from my end as well to this journey.”

First Published: Jan 09, 2026, 13:58

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(This story appears in the Jan 09, 2026 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, Click here.)