While Amazon is building fully- autonomous stores in the US, its largest competitor in India is trying to focus on what matters the most in e-commerce — faster deliveries through automation.

Flipkart, which has been working with robotic automation start-up GreyOrange for the last few years to improve its warehousing capabilities, has formally invested in the company in a Series C funding round of $140 million.

Binny Bansal, Flipkart co-founder and Group CEO, said: “As an entrepreneur myself, I have closely followed how Samay and Akash have built and grown GreyOrange to become an international technology company with customers across the world. The team will build on its strengths, especially in AI and machine learning, to launch new generation products for flexible automation.”

The Series C round was led by Mithril Capital, co-founded by Ajay Royan and Peter Thiel. Other investors include Binny Bansal, Blume Ventures, Mitsubishi, and Ajay Royan, co-founder and Managing General Partner of Mithril Capital, who will join the GreyOrange board.

Different approach

GreyOrange previously raised about $40 million, and has been doubling its revenues year-on-year in the past three-four years. “We expect to continue the growth momentum of over 100 per cent CAGR for the next four-five years, Akash Gupta, Co-founder and CTO of GreyOrange, told BusinessLine . In India, GreyOrange works with Flipkart, Myntra, Jabong and Pepperfry and has overall 50 installations including in Indonesia, Japan, South America.

“The vision has been to build a highly flexible autonomous warehouse. We envision multiple robots and AI applications coming together to ensure different operations can be done autonomously,” Gupta said.

Gupta said that it is taking a different approach from Kiva Systems, a robotics company Amazon acquired for $775 million in 2012.

GreyOrange’s robots compete directly with Amazon’s Kiva Systems in automating massive e-commerce warehouses.

“In terms of capabilities, we have gone different routes. While Kiva Systems was focussed only on pickup and storage of material in the warehouse, we are looking at putting up a completely autonomous warehouse including quality checks, storage, picking, sorting and pretty much everything within the four walls,” Gupta said.

Execution capability

“A lot of our customers focus on omni-channel warehouses, which have online and offline fulfilment. With automation they are able to improve accuracy and ship items in two-four hours delivery timelines,” he added saying such short delivery times would be impossible without autonomy.

“What we are supplying today is only the tip of the iceberg. We want to improve our internal execution capability. The rate at which we need to ship robots will explode in the next few years and we want to be ready with our manufacturing and supply chain capabilities with local support in different regions,” Gupta said.

The company is looking at hiring 50 in its sales offices and 60 in its R&D offices, both in the US.” We are also growing aggressively in Singapore R&D office,” he said. India, however, is just 10 per cent of the company’s revenues and other markets include Japan, the US and Europe.

Founded in 2011 by Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta, GreyOrange is a global technology company headquartered in Singapore with offices in India, Japan, Germany and the US. The company operates R&D Centres in India, the US and Singapore.

GreyOrange’s goods-to-person Butler, an AI-enabled autonomous robot, optimises the supply chain process from inventory storage and replenishment to order picking.

The Butler PickPal combines AI and Machine Vision automates fulfilment, working in tandem with Butler to accelerate multi-fold the pick process in fulfilment centres.

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