Though promising developments are occurring in the field of robotics, investment challenges in this sector impede rapid progress.
“VCs come in for scaling money. They don’t scale value,” said CynLr Robotics co-founder Gokul NA, in an exclusive interaction with AIM. Elaborating, he said VCs’ struggle in the M&A segments, where adherance to established norms and a lack of technological understanding in order to invest pose problems.
Further, he believes this to be a global problem as well. “Deep tech investments are not VC savvy, and the ones who are supposed to play that role, which should be the corporate VCs, do not know how to play this,” he said.
A similar stance was expressed by SML and Vizzhy founder and CEO Vishnu Vardhan, who also created Hanooman. Vardhan believes that most Indian investors are not ready to spend money on research and deep tech startups.
“If a problem is unsolved for such a large period of time, it’s a technology problem. To build a technology, you need to build a company first. To build a company, you need to build an industry before. So we don’t even have an industry yet,” said Gokul, touching upon the bitter reality of the robotics landscape in the country and globally.
CynLr Robotics is a Bengaluru-based deep tech robotics company, founded by tech enthusiasts Gokul NA and Nikhil Ramaswamy. The startup is backed by Speciale Invest and GrowX Ventures. They recently showcased their semi-humanoid CyRo at the recent Boston Robotics Summit and Expo.
“We don’t want to exit quickly, we are here for the long haul,” said Arjun Rao, one of the founders of Speciale Invest, in an interaction with AIM previously.
Challenges Galore
Experts also highlighted the issue of skill set availability. “How do you train someone on a technology that is yet to be built?” asked Gokul.
In an exclusive interaction with AIM, Flow Drive founder Mankaran Singh attributed the lack of colleges that offer robotics, as one of the major reasons for the lack of interest in this field as a whole.
“There are very few robotics engineers in India, so from a job perspective, there aren’t many companies who are working in the field of robotics and paying good salaries,” he said. With talent becoming a challenge, Singh believes that people will struggle to run robotic companies.
As per Shiksha, there are about 174 colleges offering a BTech in Robotics Engineering course in India. Out of these, 162 colleges are privately owned, and 12 colleges are owned by public or government organisations.
Little to No RoI
The projected revenue of the Indian robotics market is expected to reach $694.10 million. However, challenges remain.
While the skill gap is a major problem, the bigger concern is the return on investment. In India, manufacturing robots come at a very high cost. “Depending on how intelligent or what kind of task the robot performs, they are still very expensive compared to the labour. So, that’s why the RoI is very low in India now,” said Singh.
Furthermore, people are still reluctant to use robotic automation and prefer manual labour. “If you compare to foreign countries, where the cost of labour is very high, they mostly focus on robotics as there’s a good market there,” said Singh.
“They [VCs] are pushing this. They are trying to mobilise this, but that capital availability and sensibility to kind of evaluate whether this tech is needed and how much money will actually come to you to execute will be under a constraint,” said Gokul.
“Lobbying and getting the whole ecosystem around to build tools and components for you is a big bottleneck that we have. Today, we are trying to make it work with what is available and then best tune them,” he said.
Gokul also explained how sourcing parts from different countries also puts pressure on money conversions which can even lead to a loss amounting to crores of rupees in a simple dollar conversion.
Furthermore, despite the huge initial development capex, the results can still be disappointing. “You spend all this money building a robot, and there’s still no guarantee that whatever prototype you have built will be sustained in production,” said Singh.
While investment challenges remain in India, relatively new companies in the West have received massive backing. Figure AI, a deep-tech robotic company known for its humanoid Figure 01, has received $675 million in funding from big players such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Jensen Huang, and other prominent tech stars. However, this level of investment is still awaited in India.
On the contrary, the robotics field has also been promising for deep tech investors in the Indian autonomous vehicle space. Swaayatt Robots founder Sanjeev Sharma believes that in a year’s time, the company will have a pan-India presence and raised $1 billion. Currently, the Bhopal-based company, which focuses on autonomous driving and claims to have achieved Level 5 autonomy, has a total of $3 million in funding.
