Grey Orange raises Series A funding from Tiger Global and Blume Ventures

Gurgaon based Grey Orange announced today that it has raised Series A funding round from Tiger Global and Blume Ventures. The funding amount is around INR 54 crore. Alok Rawat (President of FG Wilson FZE), Dileep Nath (Co-founder Kanbay acquired by CapGemini) and other angels have also taken part in this round. The current funding will be utilized for hiring , R&D, scaling up operations and international expansion.

Tiger Global has been an active VC fund in India investing in major e-commerce and marketplace companies like Flipkart, Myntra.

Earlier, GOR has raised an undisclosed angel funding round from a consortium of investors led by Blume Ventures and BITS Spark Angels, and other angels including the Hatch Group, Rajesh Sawhney, and Samir Sood.

Prior to starting GOR, Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta led their team at BITS-Pilani to design & develop India’s first indigenous humanoid named AcYut, which won numerous robotic competitions around the world at universities like Stanford, Berkeley and other peer institutions across 7 countries.

Samay spoke about the expansion plans of GOR,

We’re in fact being quite selective in who we decide to partner with, as we start manufacturing our next generation of robots. We will be starting off with installations in Singapore and some other international markets.

Grey Orange is witnessing significant interest from the industry in adopting its warehousing automation technology - spearheaded by its proprietary Butler System, which enables goods to reach warehouse personnel.

GOR’s latest advancement – their ‘Butler System’ – aims to automates the warehouse operation by using a fleet of mobile robotic drive units (Butlers) to speed up and streamline work quickly and efficiently (compared to the traditional labor-intensive and potentially manual error-prone battalion of workers running around the warehouse). Grey Orange’s system works via proprietary machine learning and swarm intelligence algorithms. With global trends like automation and digitalization impacting every aspect of today’s industrial supply chain, advanced and hi-tech warehouses are the demand of the present industrial age.

“Supply chain efficiencies are going to be a pivotal factor for global trade and it’s exciting to support a company that’s looking at solving this problem. We’re also glad to see they’re targeting a global industry pain point, from day one” said Sanjay Nath, Managing Partner at Blume Ventures.

Raju Reddy, Founder of Sierra Atlantic who is joining the board said, "It is rare to see a team pursuing their passion for an idea from college days to a fully established business. This founding team has the tenacity and skill to build a substantial global company."

"This investment from Tiger and Blume is a strong validation of Grey Orange’s disruptive technology, and will enable it to scale and break into the global marketplace." said Dileep Nath, who will also be joining the Board.

‘Hardware is not the new software’, and putting together an ace hardware team requires a considerable amount of dedicated effort. In the recent past, hardware is an emerging sector but still the most difficult one to scale in India. There is a dearth of hardware accelerators or incubators in India which is isn’t helping the hardware community to flourish.

Rishabh Kaul from GOR team had shared his views on challenges hardware startups face building teams in India here.

Grey Orange Robotics is cracking the hardware model here in India and proving to be an inspiration for all those hardware enthusiastics to kickstart their hardware ventures.