Grey Orange adds wings to its international expansion plans with $30M funding round

Co-founders of Grey Orange: Akash Gupta and Samay Kohli

Gurgaon-based hardware startup Grey Orange has raised US$30 million in a series B funding round led by Tiger Global Management and existing investors Blume Ventures.

Grey Orange builds robots that operate in the warehouses of retail, logistics, and ecommerce companies with the goal of enabling quicker deliveries and minimal errors. The startup was initially launched in 2009 by Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta as an education and training company in the robotics space. Later on, it evolved into an industrial robot manufacturing company.

Its three main robots are: the Profiler, Sorter, and Butler. The Profiler is a high-speed dynamic dimension and weighing system. Sorter is a high-speed sorting system for package profiling and routing. It’s a mechanical system which segregates items based on a pre-defined logic. Butler, meanwhile, is a storage and retrieval robot.

See: Grey Orange builds warehouse robots to make sure you get your online purchase on time

Going global

The company set its international expansion plans in motion some time ago and this funding round is meant to boost those plans. Samay Kohli, the co-founder and CEO of Grey Orange, told Tech in Asia a few weeks back that “markets like Japan and China are interested in Butler, while Sorter has sparked interest in China and Southeast Asia. We have identified strategic partners in these as well as other markets.”

He confirmed today that Grey Orange will expand its operations in China and Japan and is also planning acquisitions to strengthen its position. “For pure play acquisitions, we would be looking at companies that have experience in sales, setting up warehouses and providing support and maintenance for complex systems,” says Kohli.

He also mentioned that the company has three new products in the pipeline. They are currently in the R&D phase and two of them will be launched next year.

After inaugurating its new office in Gurgaon last year, Grey Orange is now setting up its new R&D campus in Gurgaon. The construction of this facility is almost complete and will be ready to be occupied by its Gurgaon-based R&D team by next month. This 1,200 seater campus will be equipped with a global prototyping center with laser cutters, 3D printers, and a full-fledged paint shop.

“Internationally, we’re initially focused on China and Japan markets, but expect to include the larger markets in Southeast Asia, Middle East and Europe as part of our overall international market expansion push,” Grey Orange vice president James Chan told Tech in Asia.

For Singapore, which is the company’s international headquarters, Chan is looking to hire five to ten new employees for field engineering and product assembly to support its near-term Butler and Sorter product deployments. “We’re also looking to create a warehouse design and solutions team to work closely with our clients in order to track their warehouse metrics and optimize their design, using our products. The Singapore team will form the initial core of our Asia Pacific thrust, in addition to supporting our in-country teams in the region,” Chan adds.

Previously, Grey Orange raised an undisclosed amount in a series A round from Tiger Global and Blume Ventures in 2014. A couple years prior to that, it raised seed funding of half a million dollars from Blume Ventures and Bitspark Angels.

Global competition

Internationally, Grey Orange competes with major players like Swisslog, Kiva Systems, and Fetch Robotics.

Kiva Systems was acquired by Amazon in 2012 for a whopping US$775 million. It currently operates as a subsidiary company of Amazon and has been rebranded as Amazon Robotics. It manufactures mobile robotics fulfillment centers.