India Tech Report

Tag: ai

  • Eka Robotics bets on force, not language, to teach robots dexterity

    Eka Robotics bets on force, not language, to teach robots dexterity

    Eka Robotics has emerged from stealth with a Vision-Force-Action model that it says can push robots beyond the long-standing trade-off between generality and speed in manipulation tasks. The Cambridge, Massachusetts startup was co-founded in 2025 by MIT’s Pulkit Agrawal and former DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja. The deep tech entrepreneurs are pitching force sensing and simulation as the route to more capable machines.

    In robotics, much of the recent excitement has centred on vision-language-action systems, which treat language as a bridge to physical control. Eka says that is too indirect for the contact-rich realities of the physical world. Its approach instead tries to make robots learn mass, friction and inertia through practice in high-fidelity simulation, then transfer those skills to the messier settings of factories and homes.

    Across the robotics industry, the race is on to build foundation models that can scale across tasks, rather than brittle systems tuned for one environment, and the prize is a larger share of warehouse work, light manufacturing and household assistance. The strategic question is whether the winning path is imitation from human data, reinforcement learning in the real world, or simulation-first training that seeks to compress years of trial and error into computational time.

    “We’re building intelligence for the physical world in its native language: forces,” Pulkit Agrawal wrote on LinkedIn. In the same post, he added that robotics has long faced a trade-off between “generality” and “speed,” and that “the real world requires both”.

    Eka’s presentation suggests confidence that force-aware control can do more than sort objects or pick up toys. The company has highlighted tasks such as screwing in a light bulb and handling slippery items, small feats that still define the frontier of robotic manipulation. For now, the message is as important as the model: the next leap in robotics, Eka is arguing, will come not from making machines more verbal, but from making them more physical.

  • Ati Motors becomes Ati Robotics, AI-led material orchestration specialist

    Ati Motors becomes Ati Robotics, AI-led material orchestration specialist

    Ati Motors has renamed itself Ati Robotics to better reflect its evolution into a “material orchestration” specialist, the Bengaluru-based provider of autonomous mobile robots said in a recent press release.

    The Indian robotics company is moving to win an early lead in this industry-wide shift: the world’s biggest manufacturers, including some of Ati’s customers, are looking at not just deploying robots anymore, but at holistic automation and AI-led solutions that make their overall operations more efficient.

    Top manufacturing and factory executives are beginning to understand that in the modern industrial landscape, a machine that moves autonomously isn’t in itself the goal. It’s how one can harness the combination of many such robots, the multiple processes in the factory and the dynamically changing roles of the humans involved to get closer to a “lights out” facility.

    “Automation doesn’t stop at the robot,” Founder and CEO Saurabh Chandra, said in the press release, adding the company has built an integrated platform comprising robots, fleet intelligence, AI agents, and the orchestration software that ties them all to the systems running modern factories.

    “Ati Robotics is not a new company. It is the honest description of the company we have already become,” Chandra said.

    By adopting a name that encompasses its broader ambitions in artificial intelligence and systems orchestration, Ati Robotics is signalling that its own future lies not in the hardware of locomotion, but in the software of intelligence.

    Ati was founded in 2017, and has its roots in India’s top scientific research university, the Indian Institute of Science. The company’s Sherpa line of AMRs (tuggers, pallet lifters and so on) have been deployed with more than 70 enterprise customers, and the robots have tracked some 2 million autonomous missions with a success rate of 99 percent, according to the release.

    The shift to material orchestration is a necessary one, driven by a chronic shortage of skilled labor and a desperate need for efficiency in the face of fragmented supply chains. Manufacturers want to move away from the “yellow cages” of fixed robotics toward flexible, autonomous systems that can navigate human-centric environments.

    For companies such as Ati, this means the competition has shifted from basic hardware reliability to the sophistication of the “digital brains” that can manage fleets — often comprising many different types of robots.

    For startups and incumbents alike, the challenge is no longer just making a robot that can carry a pallet, but creating a system that can rethink how that pallet moves in real-time.

    One immediate opportunity is the so-called brownfield facility — an existing factory with sunk investments in human-centric infrastructure and equipment. The best solution that can integrate the existing gear effectively at minimal cost will win.

    “Customers don’t just buy a robot from us. They buy a material orchestration system – coordination, intelligence, and scalability aligned to how their factory actually works,” says Chris Dolbow, vice president of marketing at Ati. “The shift to Ati Robotics sharpens how we describe what we deliver: the right fit for automation today with intelligent innovation for the future.”

    Ati is backed by investors including Walden Catalyst Ventures, NGP Capital and its early-stage investor MFV Partners. The Bengaluru-headquartered company is moving to build on its momentum in the competitive North American and APAC markets. It has also already successfully deployed its orchestration solution at some early customers, CEO Chandra says.

  • StepChange, Nilekani-backed Beckn unveil CSDX vision to bridge global climate data gap

    StepChange, Nilekani-backed Beckn unveil CSDX vision to bridge global climate data gap

    The transition to a low-carbon economy is often framed as a struggle resulting from a combination of engineering challenges and lack of political willpower. A new vision paper argues that the true bottleneck is an information deficit. The Climate and Sustainability Data Exchange (CSDX), a proposed universal digital infrastructure, seeks to move beyond “siloed, project-level fixes” to provide the “shared rails” necessary for a planetary-scale coordination system.

    The CSDX vision paper is the result of a collaboration between StepChange and Beckn. StepChange, a climate-tech venture in Bengaluru founded by MIT alumni Ankit Jain and Sidhant Pai, provides a strategic framework for managing ESG, carbon accounting, and climate risk.

    Beckn, now called Network for Humanities (NFH, previously the Beckn Foundation), is an international network of labs focused on building open, interoperable digital infrastructure for population-scale systems. It offers the eponymous Beckn protocol, a foundational open protocol that enables interoperable, decentralized digital interactions without reliance on central platforms.

    It was co-founded in 2019 by Nandan Nilekani, founding chairman of Aadhaar, India’s Unique ID Authority, Pramod Varma, Aadhaar’s former chief architect, and Sujith Nair, who also serves as its Steward, according to his LinkedIn profile.

    The current landscape of sustainability data is a thicket of fragmented portals and manual entries, particularly in the Global South, where information is “limited in quality, expensive to access, and fragile in trust,” the authors of the paper say. Without a common language, capital is frequently mispriced, and the progress of supply chains remains invisible to the regulators and financiers who might otherwise reward decarbonization, they add.

    StepChange and Beckn envision a neutral alliance of core members who will act as stewards for the infrastructure, maintaining common schemas and onboarding policies to keep the digital rails accessible and transparent. By combining their technological and environmental expertise, the collaboration seeks to create a federated network where producers, financiers, and regulators can exchange trusted sustainability data at near-zero marginal cost.

    The proposal arrives as global climate-driven disaster costs surpass $400 billion annually and energy-related CO₂ emissions have climbed to an all-time high of 37.8 gigatonnes. With atmospheric concentrations now 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels, the CSDX initiative aims to standardize the reporting of ESG, carbon accounting, and climate risk to bridge the “data-poor” gap that currently prevents global markets from pricing resilience accurately.

    “Like railways, container shipping, or the internet, CSDX provides a minimal, interoperable digital rail that allows any actor to publish and pull records in a common language, at near-zero marginal cost,” StepChange and NFH say.

    • ESG Management captures the broad set of non-financial outcomes enterprises create across environment, society, and governance.
    • Carbon Accounting provides a rigorous, quantifiable subset of environmental impacts with unique salience for decarbonization.
    • Climate Risk ensures that external climate dynamics are translated into financial terms, enabling efficient capital allocation and resilience planning.

    Using the Beckn protocol, CSDX envisions a federated architecture where data is “governed at source while becoming globally discoverable.” By aligning with global frameworks like the ISSB and CSRD, the platform ensures that “water-withdrawal intensity,” for example, or “Scope 3” emissions mean the same thing to a textile factory in Nairobi as they do to a bank in Frankfurt.

    This is not merely an exercise in corporate disclosure; it is an attempt to create a “functioning control system for the real economy,” where sustainability is embedded into every purchase order and loan decision.

  • ‘Where should I put my robots?’ Saurabh Chandra at Ati Motors offers his views

    ‘Where should I put my robots?’ Saurabh Chandra at Ati Motors offers his views

    ‘Where should I put my robots?’ This is a question top manufacturing executives at some of the biggest industrial complexes around the world are asking, says Saurabh Chandra, founder and CEO at Ati Motors, a Bengaluru robotics venture that makes autonomous mobile robots for factories.
    Data holds the key to unlocking this solution, and often while manufacturers have a good intuitive view of what’s happening, they don’t yet have a quantified view, clearly based on data, of their factory processes, he says.
    Here’s two minutes on how Ati is helping its customers change this scenario, with its AI-led materials movement orchestration platform. You can catch the full conversation with Saurabh via the related post link below.

  • Saurabh Chandra on ‘future factory’ vision in era of physical AI

    Saurabh Chandra on ‘future factory’ vision in era of physical AI

    In this episode, I catch up with Saurabh Chandra, founder and CEO at Ati Motors, to discuss his views on how factory automation is evolving in the era of physical AI, as robots finally begin to “break out of the yellow cages” of safety zones.

    Ati Motors makes autonomous mobile robots for materials movement in factories, and its customers include several Fortune 500 companies. As Ati expands its footprint into the US market, Saurabh outlines a future where Physical AI and software agents work in tandem to redefine the “Digital Assembly Line.”

    The idea of a “lights out” factory or a “dark factory” is decades old. Engineers dreamed of fully automated installations where robots and machines took over — without human intervention — and made useful things for us. Cars, for example.

    But a combination of both technical challenges and real-world non-engineering problems ensured that such factories remained more science fiction and less reality. Until recently. Today, many experts in the industry and advanced manufacturing believe that we’re approaching a tipping point with respect to automation and robotics technologies.

    In this conversation, Saurabh outlines the idea of an AI-led materials movement orchestration platform that Ati has already deployed with some early customers. The idea is that factory executives are beginning to realize that the real value on the shop floor isn’t the robot itself, but the material it moves.

    Saurabh explains why traditional ERP systems often fail to track Work-in-Progress (WIP) inventory, leaving a visibility problem as SKU complexity has multiplied manifold over the last 15 years. By creating a “spatial system of record” that tracks every trolley, bin, and staging area in real-time, Ati Motors is helping global giants move from intuitive management to quantified, data-driven orchestration.

    Global manufacturing is currently caught in a pincer movement of structural labour shortages across advanced economies and a geopolitical push to reshore production closer to end consumers. As the “factory of the world” model decentralises away from China, the future of Western industrial hubs depends on their ability to integrate “physical AI” that can handle the hyper-personalised, high-SKU demands of modern commerce.

    This manufacturing arms race, increasingly prioritized by the boards of Fortune 500 companies, is turning autonomous orchestration from an experimental project into the essential infrastructure of 21st-century industrial sovereignty.

    “A lot of people in large companies, for whom status quo was their friend, find that situation is now absolutely in the past,” Saurabh notes during the interview. And at Ati, “we have really transformed into an organization where the robots are the means to the end, which is finally making sure that the factory runs in the way it’s supposed to. The goal is to create a system of record for the shop floor — integrating physical agents, software agents, and humans into a single, intelligent orchestration layer.”

    The platform, Ati Flow, also considers how physical AI or robots, software AI agents and humans will all interact making factories of the future more efficient and sustainable. And Saurabh gives us a sense of how the journey to the dark factory will likely involve three phases and how he thinks Ati can catalyse and facilitate that transformation.

  • Coming up: Saurabh Chandra at Ati Motors on a rendezvous with robots

    Coming up: Saurabh Chandra at Ati Motors on a rendezvous with robots

    The idea of a “lights out” factory or a “dark factory” is decades old. Engineers dreamed of fully automated installations where robots and machines took over — without human intervention — and made useful things for us. Cars, for example.

    But a combination of both technical challenges and real-world non-engineering problems ensured that such factories remained more science fiction and less reality. Until recently. Today, many experts in industry and advanced manufacturing believe that we’re approaching an “inflection point” — yes, that cliche, but it might be true — with respect to automation and robotics technologies.

    Saurabh Chandra, founder and CEO at Ati Motors, discussed his views on some of these points with me earlier this week. Ati makes autonomous mobile robots for materials movement in factories, and it’s customers include several Fortune 500 companies.

    Saurabh spoke about how Ati is preparing for the “Future Factory” where robots will no longer stay in the safety zones of “yellow cages” but mix with humans and other robots. He outlined the idea of a materials (and robots and even human) movement orchestration, which Ati has already developed an early platform for, envisioning the physical AI, software AI agents and humans all interacting with one another in making factories more efficient and sustainable.

    Catch the full conversation right here on Friday, April 10, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s a one-minute preview, with Saurabh explaining how we’ll rendezvous with robots.