These founders raised $10m to bring robot brains online

COO Arudchelvan Krishnamoorthy (left) and CEO Gajan Mohanarajah.

Rapyuta Robotics announced a series A of funding today for US$10 million. The round was led by SBI. SBI also participated in Rapyuta’s seed round of US$2.95 million in January of last year, and the company also recently received US$500,000 from the Swiss government for its joint work with the Institute of Applied Information Technology Cloud Computing Lab at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

Rapyuta is putting robot brains into the cloud to offset the high price and computational power robots need to function. The team is currently working on drones that can be used for infrastructure inspection and plans to release its first product in mid-2017.

“To the cloud, it doesn’t matter what type of robot it is,” explains CEO Dr. Gajan Mohanarajah. Rapyuta’s drone inspectors can go “anywhere people want a quick overview” according to COO Arudchelvan Krishnamoorthy. The team is already working with a shipbuilder and sees other uses with power plants, wind turbines, or even train parking.

The robots can be kept outside so a human inspector doesn’t always need to be on site. This is especially useful for remote locations like dams that require frequent monitoring. “The hardware has to work 24/7 in all weather conditions… once we deploy, I want to be able to go to bed and sleep,” laughs Gajan.

Growing

When Tech in Asia last spoke with Rapyuta Robotics, it was an eight person team with engineering mostly in Switzerland. Since last year it has expanded to 27 full-time employees across India, Switzerland, and Japan. “When you are making hardware that constantly interacts with the environment, if something can get done in 10 months with 10 people, it doesn’t mean it can be done in one month with 100 people. It requires a lot of testing,” Gajan says.

Rapyuta Robotics’ management team. Left to right: Raymond Oung, Director of Engineering. Gajan Mohanarajah, CEO. Kai Matsuda, CFO. Arudchelvan Krishnamoorthy, COO. Mana Yamawaki, Director of Business Development. CTO Dominique Hunziker was in Switzerland at the time.

In addition to outdoor applications, Rapyuta has developed an indoor positioning system that allows its drones to achieve less than 10 centimeter accuracy – the amount needed to get through doors – without any cameras or motion capture equipment.

While the company is producing robots as well as the operating technology, the founders explain the drones were built out of necessity. “The initial plan was to just get off the shelf robots,” Arudchelvan says. “But when we started looking at the hardware, there wasn’t much that would work on our platform. It’s something you take out and use on the weekend. We need things that can operate outside 24/7 for two years.”

As the space matures, the team plans to focus more on tools that let other developers connect to Rapyuta’s core technology – or what Gajan describes as the “plumbing” – so other developers can remain product focused.

As long as Rapyuta stays in drones though, it will face stiff competition from companies like Airware which has raised over US$70 million. Arudchelvan is confident; last year the company fulfilled all of its demo requests and he adds, “next year we are planning to sell 300 to 400 systems.”

Want to learn more about the future of robotics? Founder and CEO Gajan Mohanarajah will be making his appearance on September 7 at our Tokyo conference.

Don’t miss your last chance to grab passes and meet with Asia’s top technology startups, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs.