True Colours
Robot maker GreyOrange is
the only Indian startup focused on solving etailers' supply chain problems
The best startups are those
that are born out of passion. GreyOrange is one of them.
When Akash Gupta and Samay Kohli
were studying at Birla Institute of Technology & Science-Pilani, they
developed what was per haps India's first home-grown humanoid called AcYut.They
travelled the world competing at and winning many robotic competitions at top
universities including Stanford and UC Berkeley. After completing their
engineering, instead of chasing a corporate career the duo started an education
and training company in the robotics space. They soon decided to venture into
industrial robot manufacturing. If their startup is called GreyOrange, it is
for a reason: Grey is a proxy for experience and Orange for the fun quotient.
“We are one of the very few companies in the world and the only one in India
focused on solving etailers' supply chain problems,“ says Gupta.
A few broad thoughts shaped
their startup. The founders wanted to build a hardware product capable of
tackling a problem that had massive scale potential.“Representing India and
competing at the international level gave us a very global approach to building
our business,“ says Kohli. The duo looked at many industries from logistics to
oil & gas before zeroing on the warehousing needs of etailers. Today, it
builds robots -of three kinds, called Profiler, Sorter and Butler -that operate
in the warehouses of etailers and logistics firms, helping them gain
efficiencies and minimise errors. GreyOrange competes with global players like
San Jose-based Fetch Robotics (in which SoftBank entered as an investor in
mid-2015) and Kiva Systems, which was acquired by Amazon for $775 million.
GreyOrange has a staff
strength of 300-odd employees, operates out of three cities in India and has
two offices in Singapore and Hong Kong. It claims that it dominates the
logistics automa tion business India with an over 90% market share and has 12
clients, 10 in India including Flipkart, Amazon, Jabong, Del hivery, Gojavas
and DTDC. “They offer competitive solutions that are attuned to the Indian
environment,“ says Abhishek Chakraborty, executive director, DTDC Express.
GreyOrange is now thinking big as it readies a
world class 1,200-seater R&D facility in Gurgaon equipped with a prototype
centre. Having raised $35 million from investors like Tiger Global, Blume
Ventures and a few angel investors since inception, it is ini tially looking to
expand overseas into markets like Japan and China and later South East Asia,
the Gulf and Europe. “Yes there are older and bigger robotic companies
overseas. But our tech nology is much more on the cloud, and advanced.
We are disrupting the
market. It is easier for a new player to do it,“ says Kohli.
Developing and
manufacturing products in In dia, GreyOrange will have some cost advantages
they claim they are five times cheaper than other providers in India and
two-and-a-half times glob ally. But that's not what the founders are looking to
exploit. “It is not the price but the technology that will give us the
competitive edge,“ Kohli says. As they plan to scale up from a headcount of 300
to over 500 in a year, people issues are their biggest chal lenges, they say.
“We will have people joining us from different cultures and regions. As an
organisation, we need to assimilate them and drive the team around the same
vision. It is a big challenge,“ says Gupta.
ETM3JAN16
No comments:
Post a Comment