Will Robots Help India Ride Next Industrial Revolution?

The fourth industrial revolution is upon us, where machine intelligence is usurping human intelligence at an overwhelming speed. More than China, India must understand its significance in order to lead the revolution as an industrial giant. We missed it last time. China is already stuffing its industrial corridors with an army of robots, while India is still trying to catch up with the dragon and others. To win the battle, India needs more startups in hardware robotic space, not just artificial intelligence (AI)-backed software robots, a.k.a bots.

- Sandeep Soni

In India, the biggest success story in warehouse automation has been the robotics start-up GreyOrange, started by BITS Pilani alumni Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta in 2011. According to the company, it commands 90 per cent of India’s warehouse automation market. GreyOrange offers two robots called Butler (an automated storage system) and Sorter (a packet sortation system). “We looked at different sectors, which can benefit maximum through robotics. There have been few innovations using technology around warehousing and logistics in the past. Instead of a product-focus, they worked more towards finding custom solutions for warehousing, wherein scaling up was tough,” says Akash Gupta, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, GreyOrange.

The early stage fund, Blume Ventures, which has invested twice, in April 2014 and August 2015 in GreyOrange, says warehousing automation was inevitable and GreyOrange took the lead. “The technology has taken off not because GreyOrange didn’t have tools like vertical stacking, scanners, and location detectors for basic automation, but in small warehouses they faced challenge of economies of scale. Even in large warehouses, where goods are kept far apart, workers movement leads to inefficiency. GreyOrange robots carry goods to the people in the warehouse, which makes the entire movement fluid and faster,” says Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner, Blume Ventures.

Inspired by Kohli and Gupta’s success was their junior, Srikar Reddy and his three friends. They launched commercial and industrial painting automation start-up, Endless Robotics, in April 2015. However, the automation enables the painters instead of replacing them with robots. The idea is to leave the skillful part of the job, that includes painting around corners, the window edges etc., for painters.