Building an AI copilot for robotics engineers

This article is a part of Startup Spotlight, a series that features young, up-and-coming startups.

Photo credit: Sanjil Jain

Best friends for over a decade, Sanjil Jain and Nikhil Kumar built their first company together in 2022. During his ten years in engineering, Kumar struggled to move hardware from simulation to reality.

The duo launched Drift to automate the tedious setup work required in robotics development.

😟 Problem

Robotics engineers spend up to 70% of their week configuring simulators and writing setup scripts. This manual work leaves them with less time for hardware development.

This bottleneck forces highly paid engineers into repetitive tasks, severely delaying timelines for autonomous vehicle and robotics teams. As a result, physical hardware deployment moves slower than software development.

💡 Solution

Drift is an AI-powered copilot specifically designed for robotics engineers. Users describe their desired simulation environment, and the platform automatically generates the necessary components.

The software includes the following core capabilities.

• Automates the generation of worlds, robot descriptions, and controllers.
• Integrates natively with industry-standard stacks like robot operating system (ROS) and Gazebo.
• Reducing manual configuration work from weeks to minutes.

Image credit: Drift

📊 Market size

The broader robotics sector is projected to reach US$620 billion by 2035. Within this space, around three million engineers are actively building and deploying hardware.

The rise of embodied AI is also increasing demand for simulation data, creating a growing need for automation tools that support robotics development.

🤝 Team

• Sanjil Jain. CEO. He has product management experience across enterprise software companies.
• Nikhil Kumar. CTO. He brings over a decade of robotics experience from his time at Qualcomm.

🚀 Traction

🏆 Competition

💰 Financials

🚩 Risks