Grey Orange, a nine-year old Indian startup, in the robotics automation space has raised $140 million (close to Rs 1000 crore) in its Series C funding and the major investment has come from Mithril Capital, an investment company based out of the US.
According to a VCCircle report, others to have participated in this round of funding include Blume Ventures, an existing investor and Sachin Bansal, a co-founder at Flipkart. Grey Orange has expressed its intention to deploy these funds into research and development and in improving its supply chain system.
The two founders of Mythril Capital are Peter Thiel of PayPal fame and Ajay Royan an investor of Indian origin. They have expressed their faith in Grey Orange’s business and are hopeful of its doing well. Similar sentiments have been conveyed by Sachin Bansal also, claiming he has been closely observing the way the two founders of Grey Orange have managed the start up.
Grey Orange has made an entry in the US market too, with 740 robots being supplied to a customer there and will operate out of Atlanta. The founders, Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta have already built AcYut, which is a humanoid robot and have done sufficient work in the field to take the business forward.
The major thrust area for Grey Orange is warehouse automation, where the company has built a robot Butler System and it is packed with a lot of machine learning and algorithms based on swarm intelligence. And their customers are largely in the ecommerce segment and companies involved in providing third party logisitics.
In terms of funding, the last time Grey Orange raised funds was almost 3 years back when they received $30 million and Tiger Global was also one of the investors then. The revenue figures definitely look very impressive, but the startup will have to work on its profitability. The countries/regions where their robots can be seen in action, besides India, are Japan, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. The US market, as mentioned, has also opened up now.
As far as the domestic customers are concerned, the list includes, Pepperfry, Flipkart, Aramex, DTDC and Mahindra Tractors.