Co-worker cast in iron

At the Bengaluru warehouse of an e-commerce giant, robots are moving shelves stacked with products. They take them to a floor assistant, who scans the barcode to confirm the items. Called Butlers, these robots help each worker handle 500 items within an hour, compared with only 40-80 on their own.

At courier company DTDC’s Delhi hub, robots called Sorters divide up the parcels for each city and then for the various pin codes within that city. They can segregate about 3,500 parcels in an hour, compared with 800 when done manually. Additionally, they can measure not only the weight of the parcel but also its length, breadth and height, and thereby calculate the space it would occupy during the onward journey. As robots speed up the sorting, DTDC has dropped its plans for creating additional capacity.

Growing at a scorching pace in India, e-commerce, retail and courier businesses are grappling for ways to meet customer requirements in a prompt and efficient manner. Warehouse managers struggling to keep pace with rapidly multiplying products and stock-keeping units now have a helping hand with a difference — robotic solutions from Grey Orange Robotics.

“Warehousing is getting faster, just-in-time. It is also moving from business-to-business to business-to-consumer, implying it is no longer about movement of goods from carton to carton only,” says Samay Kohli, CEO and co-founder of Grey Orange. The range of products and their handling operations are becoming increasingly complex, and this is where robotic solutions can make a difference, says Kohli, who co-founded the company with Akash Gupta in 2011. While studying at BITS Pilani, Kohli had developed a humanoid robot, AcYut, at the college’s centre for robotics. The duo then travelled to various robotic competitions, including the RobOlympics and Robocup.

In 2009, after leaving college, Kohli and Gupta started Grey Orange as an education and training company for robotics. However, a visit to the chaotic warehouse of an e-commerce company in 2011 opened their eyes to the potential for robotics in warehouses. That led to the ‘birth’ of Butler and Sorter.

Grey Orange — “grey stands for experience while orange is for fun and youth” — has raised close to $10 million in a Series A round, led by Tiger Global Management LLC and Blume Venture Advisors, along with investors Alok Rawat and Dileep Nath.

Today, top e-commerce and courier companies are using its services in India. The company pre-builds its robots and does not customise them for clients. “We are R&D-focused; when we sense the pain points, we address them,” says Kohli.

His clients get a return on investment in 12-14 months, he says. “It is a scale function. After a certain scale, it is difficult to maintain efficiencies. Our robots don’t replace people but make them more efficient.”

DTDC knows this well. At one time, heavy inflow of parcels had forced the courier company to consider expanding its facilities. Not anymore, with Sorter on its side. “Our hub in Delhi processes 25,000 to 30,000 packages a day. We were facing capacity crunch and needed automation if we wanted to grow further. With Sorter, we are able to use the same facility with higher throughput,” says Abhishek Chakraborty, executive director at DTDC Express. An in-built system in the robot automatically assigns a slot to each parcel.

Grey Orange robots have already been installed at 45 sites in India, and the client list includes Jabong, Mahindra, Aramex, Flipkart and Delhivery.

The starting price for a Sorter is $70,000 and variants can cost up to half a million dollars; the Butler’s selling price starts at about $30,000. Grey Orange will come out with a new product by January, but Kohli declines to share the details just yet. All he is willing to say is “We plan to add a product to our portfolio every year”. And that’s understandable, given the rising number of companies that are opting for automation.

Grey Orange has grown faster than Kohli and Gupta ever expected — from 25 people in 2011 to 260 currently — and is close to breaking even. Overseas, it sells its robots in Hong Kong and Singapore, which are proving to be markets with a “robust demand”.

Next on its itinerary are Japan and China, in the next 12 months. With 40 per cent of the world’s robots already in Japan, Grey Orange’s made-in-India robots will likely feel right at home in the land of the rising sun.

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