AI co-pilot for the engineers building smart devices

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

Image credit: Timmy Loen

Pratik Sharda and Yashwant Dagar experienced the same problem from different angles. While Sharda was leading smart speaker development at PhonePe, and Dagar was building edge AI applications at AMD, both saw how hardware-specific software and manual processes created bottlenecks. They founded CraftifAI in 2025 to address these long-standing inefficiencies in the embedded systems industry.

😟 Problem

The number of connected smart devices is projected to grow from 16 billion in 2023 to over 41 billion by 2030. As devices like cars and robots become more complex, the demand for specialized engineers grows. However, the global talent pool of embedded software engineers has remained stagnant at around 2.5 million, creating a significant bottleneck that slows innovation and increases development costs.

💡 Solution

CraftifAI is building a generative AI platform to make embedded development more efficient and accessible. The company’s goal is to remove dependency on specific hardware vendors, allowing engineers to build and deploy applications more quickly.

The platform, CraftifAI Orbit, aims to help companies with:

• Building and deploying edge AI and embedded software.
• Reducing development costs and accelerating time to market.
• Eliminating hardware vendor lock-in.

Photo credit: CraftifAI

📊 Market size

The rapid growth of AI from the cloud to the edge is driving demand across multiple sectors, including robotics, industrial IoT, and consumer electronics. Modern vehicles now contain three times more sensors and chips than they did a decade ago. This trend is a key factor behind the projected growth to over 41 billion connected devices by 2030.

🤝 Team

• Pratik Sharda. Co-founder and CEO. Formerly worked at PhonePe.
• Yashwant Dagar. Co-founder and CTO. Former system design engineer at Xilinx-AMD and Sima.ai.

🚀 Traction

• CraftifAI is running a pilot with a semiconductor company publicly listed in the US.
• The company has also secured pilot programs with several Indian original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) across robotics, drones, IoT, and AI camera domains. 

🏆 Competition

CraftifAI positions itself by tackling two long-standing issues in the embedded software industry: manual driver development and hardware vendor lock-in. By creating an AI-powered, hardware-agnostic platform, the company aims to provide a more flexible alternative to traditional, siloed development cycles.

💰 Financials

CraftifAI operates on three primary business models: a monthly SaaS subscription for its Orbit platform, a marketplace of pre-built applications, and new product development services.