Dr. Sumant Sharma

Sumant Sharma is Co-Founder and CEO of EraDrive, a Palo Alto company building the autonomy layer for every spacecraft operating in congested and contested orbit. EraDrive’s technology lets spacecraft navigate using onboard vision rather than GPS, an approach that stays resilient precisely where traditional PNT breaks down under jamming, spoofing, or denied access. Today that software is flying on NASA’s Starling mission, and the roadmap runs from single-spacecraft autonomy to coordinated swarms that operate as a virtual constellation. Sumant earned his PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford’s Space Rendezvous Lab, where he built flight-proven vision-based navigation. Before founding EraDrive, he scaled the autonomy team at Wisk Aero, a Boeing subsidiary, building conflict detection and resolution and navigation for autonomous aircraft. His focus today is the operational bottleneck facing every operator in a crowded orbit: how to give a spacecraft the ability to sense, navigate, and act on its own when GPS and the ground can no longer be trusted.