STARTUP SPECIAL.................TOP INNOVATOR - Innovations that Launch a Business, Disrupt an Industry

STARTUP SPECIAL TOP INNOVATOR - Innovations that Launch a Business, Disrupt an Industry





GreyOrange is preparing to dominate in warehouse automation beyond India

... and the (ET) award goes to

Samay Kohli & Akash Gupta GreyOrange IGreyOrange began life in 2011 as an education and training company for robotics. But soon founders Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta realized it was not a model they could scale. They also became aware that their core strength lay in technology, as opposed to building an army of teachers. So after six months, they launched a product firm building medical devices and camera tracking systems. But that did not satisfy them. A year after starting up and two pivots later, GreyOrange got a clear direction: to service the ecommerce industry .

Although ecommerce was stuttering in India at the time, the two engineers from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani had the farsightedness to understand that warehouses would become the power centers of ecommerce companies.

Their unconventional and bold bet h a s c o m e t r u e , a n d t o d ay GreyOrange commands 90% of India's warehouse automation market, powering over 1.8 lakh square feet of storage space. It competes with companies such as Swisslog and Kiva Systems, a subsidiary of internet retailer Amazon.

“The core team is pretty happy about it,“ said Chief Executive Kohli, 29, on winning the `Top Innovator' award. “We are very excited.“ GreyOrange--an amalgamation of grey matter and orange, a colour Kohli says represents fun and creativity--has two products: Sorter and Butler.

Sorter, which costs Rs 3 lakh, is a high-speed system that consolidates orders and routes parcels. By Diwali, the company will have installed sorting capacity of three million parcels a day . Butler, which costs Rs 50,000, is an order-picking system. It is tailored for high-volume, high-mix orders, characteristic of ecommerce and omni-channel logistics.

GreyOrange said it has sold about a hundred units of its automation products so far.

“Robotics was perceived to be a tough subject, but that was contradictory to what Akash and I thought,“ Kohli said.

I t i s a l a r g e m a rk e t t h a t G re y O r a n g e i s g o i n gafter: According to London based WinterGreen Research's Industrial Logistics Robots report, sale of robots for logistics, packaging and materials handling, among other things, is projected to grow at a compounded rate of 10.1% and reach $31.3 billion by 2020.

To tap into some of that potential, GreyOrange is set to expand into Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Europe, for which it raised $30 million from Tiger Global and Blume Ventures, the largest fundraise by a robotics company globally .

Presently , the company has more than 300 employees at its offices in Hong Kong, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.Its Gurgaon-based development team will soon move into a 1,200seat campus with a global prototyping center that is equipped with las e r c u t t e r s, 3 D p r i n t e r s, a full-fledged paintshop, five-axis milling and lathe, customer demo centres and a host of simulation equipment.

Not one to rest on their laurels, Kohli and Gupta are already working on their next product.

ET14AUG15