BackGrey Orange Robotics to expand into warehouse automation
Co-founder Samay Kohli said the move will help the company expand into foreign markets
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Grey Orange Robotics Pvt. Ltd, which has a technical collaboration with Singapore-based industrial automation company Grey Orange Pte. Ltd, is planning to expand its business focus to include “generic warehousing automation solutions, which may or may not involve robotics", its co-founder Samay Kohli said in an interview last week.
According to Kohli, who founded Grey Orange Robotics along with Akash Gupta in 2011, the move will help the company expand into foreign markets since “the two companies now function as a single business unit".
Grey Orange Robotics till recently focused primarily on building robots called ‘sorters’ and ‘butlers’, depending on what warehousing or sorting functions they performed. The company now wants to tap opportunities that have arisen from the trend of retail brands no longer wanting to stack things up in inventories, and instead “shift things around from one place to another", said Kohli.
“We are not going to enter warehousing itself, but we are going to add more products in the automation sector. With our current products, we can automate 30% of the process, but we want to help our customers get to 100% automation of warehousing," he added.
Kohli said the company is also in the process of setting up a new research and development (R&D) centre in Gurgaon, which is “a 25,000 sq ft office with fancy sleep pods, terrace gardens, open air workspaces, and dedicated recreation zones for its employees, (and which) will be ready in July/August".
“We are calling it the ‘Project Taj Mahal’ because we are designing every bit of it," said Kohli.
The company’s expansion plans follow its raising close to $10 million in a Series A round, led by Tiger Global Management LLC and Blume Venture Advisors Pvt. Ltd along with independent investors Alok Rawat and Dileep Nath.
After investing in Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce firm and one of Grey Orange’s star customers, this is the first time Tiger Global, a New York-based venture capital fund, known to invest in technology, telecom and media sectors, has invested in a hardware company.
For the next three years, Grey Orange will continue with current installations in India while exploring opportunities in Singapore, Dubai and Western Europe. It will also start manufacturing bots on a large scale to meet global requirements.
“By large scale, I don’t mean in the thousands—I mean like 60 bots," said Kohli, adding that the India unit used to manufacture single units at $25,000 each. The company has manufactured seven generations of robots for sorting and warehousing.
“Our biggest customers now used to be e-commerce websites like Flipkart and Jabong, but now we are going to team up with some of the biggest names in third-party logistics companies in the world," added Kohli.
Venture capitalists appear to be willing to bet big money on emerging sectors like robotics and automation.
“The reason for this razor sharp focus on warehousing and logistics is because warehousing problems have been around forever, as opposed to ecommerce that suddenly boomed. Grey Orange is moving to other markets and not depending on ecommerce only," said Sundi Natrajan, an early investor at Grey Orange and member of the Indian Angel Network.
Karthik Reddy, managing partner, Blume Venture Partners, who took part in both the rounds of funding, said he believes that “ecommerce is shrinking in India".
“In a few years, there will be very few but large ecommerce players. This means consolidation of warehouses," he added.
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