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Ram Shriram, one of the early Google investors, is now backing Skyroot Aerospace, India’s first space-tech unicorn. It highlights growing investor confidence in the country’s rapidly expanding private aerospace and deep-tech startup ecosystem. While Skyroot has raised $155 million in total funding to date, Shriram has remained the company’s most prominent and consistent investor throughout its journey.
Back in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were looking for investment bids for their little-known, newly founded search engine called Google. Ram Shriram, who was working as a Vice President at Amazon at the time, found it interesting and decided to invest. He also joined the board of directors, eventually shaping the company's future. Today, Shriram has done something similar with Skyroot, an Indian-origin aerospace company that’s now valued at $1.1 billion.
Shriram, the 69-year-old investor, said, “Access to space is one of the key challenges of our time.”
Before he established his venture capital firm, Ram Shriram had a corporate career spanning four decades, starting as an engineer at Bell-Northern Research. In 1994, he joined Netscape as Vice President, a time when the company had not shipped any products or posted any revenue. By 1998, Shriram had become President of Junglee – an online comparison shopping firm he had founded, which established him as an entrepreneur.
In the same year, Amazon acquired Junglee, and Shriram came to Amazon as Vice President. He worked closely with Jeff Bezos and gained firsthand experience in building transformative companies.
He invested $250,000 in Google, which was simply a Stanford PhD project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to SEC filings, Ram Shriram still owns approximately 2.47 million Class C shares and 2.11 million Class A shares of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), worth over $747 million at current prices.
In 2000, he founded Sherpalo Ventures to focus on early-stage disruptive technology investments. When Google went public in 2004, his 2% stake was worth $450 million. It cemented his status as one of Silicon Valley’s most successful angel investors.
Shriram’s Sherpalo Ventures has made over 50 investments across diverse sectors. InMobi, the mobile advertising company, became a unicorn with Sherpalo’s support. India’s fintech payment giant Razorpay also turned into a unicorn through Shriram’s backing. Gusto, the HR and payroll technology company, earned unicorn status, while Notion, a productivity software platform, also crossed the billion-dollar valuation mark. Krikey AI, the artificial intelligence startup founded by his daughters, Jhanvi and Ketalla (both Stanford graduates), reflects his support for next-generation innovators.
Skyroot Aerospace now joins the unicorn club in 2026, making it Shriram’s billion-dollar success story.
Shriram was born in Chennai (erstwhile Madras) in 1957. Despite the financial hardship, he excelled academically. He reportedly sold his grandparents’ home to pay for his university education and earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Loyola College, Chennai, under the University of Madras.
He later pursued an MBA from the University of Michigan before moving to the United States in the early 1990s. He lives there with his wife, Vijay Shriram. They have built both a successful business life and a strong philanthropic legacy. As of 2026, Ram Shriram’s net worth stands at approximately $4.2 billion.
Also Read: Startup News Today: Skyroot Aerospace Hits Unicorn Status With Backing From BlackRock and GIC
Shriram’s involvement in the project is already gathering headlines. The Indian-origin American investor has committed $60 million in funding, raising the company's valuation to $1.1 billion. His venture capital firm, Sherpalo Ventures, was joined by firms such as Singapore’s GIC, BlackRock, Arkam Ventures, and Shanhvi Family Office.
Skyroot’s CEO, Pawan Kumar Chandana, acknowledged Shriram’s investment, welcoming “one of Silicon Valley’s most respected investors and Google’s board member” to the company board of directors.
In January 2022, Sherpalo Ventures led a $4.5 million bridge round alongside Wami Capital and Neeraj Arora (ex-WhatsApp) to provide Skyroot with critical early-stage capital to develop its technology. By September 2022, the company had raised $51 million in Series B funding led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC.
In October 2023, the startup raised another $27.5 million led by Temasek, bringing total funding to roughly $120 million as Skyroot approached orbital launch capability. The May 7 funding round, jointly led by Sherpalo Ventures and GIC, raised $60 million and helped Skyroot achieve unicorn status.
The most important question now is: with Shriram’s involvement in the process, will Skyroot Aerospace achieve the success SpaceX has gained over the years?
