Robotics Startups in Kerala — A Deep Dive Into EyeROV, iHub Robotics, Sastra Robotics, and Genrobotics
When people talk about robotics in India, the conversation usually centres on Bengaluru or Pune. Kerala doesn't come up often. But over the last decade, a small number of robotics companies have been built and scaled out of Kochi and Trivandrum — working in domains as different as underwater inspection, humanoid robots, automated hardware testing, and sanitation robotics.
This isn't a coincidence. Kerala's state government has named robotics as one of 22 priority sectors in its industrial policy, alongside AI, blockchain, and big data, with the state's industrial sector projected to reach $15.1 billion by 2028. The Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) has actively backed deep-tech and robotics ventures through grants, accelerator programs, and platforms like the Kerala Technology Innovation Zone in Kalamassery. Kochi and Trivandrum are also increasingly being positioned as Global Capability Centre (GCC) destinations, which has helped build a base of engineering talent that several of these companies have drawn on directly.
Here's a detailed look at four companies that represent very different parts of what robotics in Kerala actually looks like today.
EyeROV — Underwater Robots for Infrastructure Inspection
EyeROV builds Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) for underwater inspection. The company's core technology lets clients inspect dams, tunnels, pipelines, bridges, ports, and offshore infrastructure without sending a human diver into hazardous, deep, or low-visibility conditions.
How it started
EyeROV was founded in 2016–2017 by Johns T. Mathai and Kannappa Palaniappan P, who first met as engineering students at the College of Engineering, Trivandrum, between 2006 and 2010, while competing in inter-college robotics competitions. Mathai went on to study at IIT Delhi, and Palaniappan enrolled in the ocean engineering programme at IIT Madras. After graduating, the two reconnected and set up EyeROV in Kochi to build robots for undersea inspection.
The decision to base the company in Kochi was deliberate. As Mathai has explained in interviews, being a coastal city near water bodies and clients — whether oil and gas companies or government institutions — made practical sense. He has also noted that while Kerala's talent pool for this kind of deep tech work is smaller than in a city like Bengaluru, employee retention has been stronger, since people in Tier-II cities tend to stay in their roles longer.
What the company has built
EyeROV's product line includes the TUNA (a base ROV model), SAGARA (a more rugged underwater system rated to greater depths, sometimes referred to as TROUT in earlier coverage), and the iBOAT Alpha, an autonomous surface vessel. The company has also built EVAP (EyeROV Visualization Analytics Platform), an AI-enabled analytics layer that processes the data collected during inspections — including ultrasonic testing, sonar imaging, and AI-based defect detection — to generate real-time reporting and digital twins of inspected structures.
A distinguishing technical capability is the company's proprietary long-tunnel inspection system, which can operate up to 10 km into a tunnel — a capability the company says places it among a small number of organisations globally with this level of expertise.
Traction and validation
EyeROV's early breakthrough came when DRDO became one of its first customers, validating the company's TUNA system for use at naval research laboratories including NSTL and NPOL. Since then, the company has completed more than 150 projects for organisations including Maersk, ONGC, and the Adani Group.
In September 2025, EyeROV secured a ₹47 crore contract from the Indian Navy to supply advanced Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles, including its flagship EyeROV TROUT — a 300-metre depth-rated, military-grade ROV. The company has also been recognised as one of India's top five defence startups, winning the National Startup Award in 2022. In May 2026, EyeROV's co-founder represented the company at the India–Norway CEOs Roundtable in Oslo as part of Prime Minister Modi's official delegation, proposing an "India-Norway Marine Tech Innovation Corridor" focused on subsea engineering and underwater robotics collaboration.
Funding and scale
According to press coverage from Inc42, CXOToday, and CIOL, EyeROV's funding history includes an early seed round from GAIL (India) Ltd, participation from the K Chittilappilly Trust and Venture Center Pune, and a ₹10 crore (~$1.2 million) pre-Series A round led by Unicorn India Ventures in 2024. Its most recent round, co-led by AWE Funds and Unicorn India Ventures in early 2026, raised ₹13 crore, with the company stating this is intended as a precursor to a planned $10 million Series A round. Tracxn aggregates EyeROV's total funding at approximately $3.44 million across six rounds and 15 investors, broadly consistent with the individual rounds reported in the press. EyeROV estimates the global underwater infrastructure inspection market at roughly $13 billion, with the Indian segment at approximately $800 million. The company has executed over 150 projects for more than 80 clients, including Tata Power, NHPC, Adani, ONGC, BPCL, and Maersk, alongside engagements with the Indian Navy, DRDO, and the Indian Coast Guard.
iHub Robotics — Humanoid Robots for Service Industries
iHub Robotics builds humanoid and semi-humanoid robots designed for service-oriented tasks in sectors like hospitality, healthcare, airports, and railway stations. The company describes its long-term direction as "Physical AI" — robots that can operate autonomously alongside humans in real-world environments, rather than purely industrial robots confined to a factory floor.
How it started
iHub Robotics was founded in 2021 by three friends from Kerala — Athil Krishna, Akhil K. Haridasan, and Sarath S. According to the founders, the original motivation traces back to 2019, when the team submitted humanoid robot proposals to the government for defence applications, with the BSF expressing interest in a demonstration in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted that early progress, and the team — without a working prototype at the time — returned to Kerala to keep building.
The company is headquartered in Kochi, with manufacturing based at a factory in Kalamassery. According to the founders, most of the company's hardware — including body systems, battery management, and main control boards — is now built in-house, developed over roughly three years of iterative hardware and control system design.
What the company has built
iHub Robotics's flagship product is Tara Gen-1, described as India's most advanced semi-humanoid robot. It is built for hospitality, healthcare, airport, and railway station environments, with AI-powered speech recognition, real-time decision-making, and multi-language communication capabilities for customer service-style interactions. Tara Gen-1 has already been exported to the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
In January 2025, iHub Robotics became the first Indian company to be officially recognised by NVIDIA, after being selected for the NVIDIA Humanoid Robotics Programme — giving the company access to NVIDIA's advanced technologies and research collaborations.
Beyond hardware, the company has also launched the iHub School of Learning, an education initiative aimed at training students in AI and robotics, with a stated goal of reaching 100,000 students with deep-tech skills.
Funding and scale
According to multiple independent reports from Entrackr, Business Standard, and BW Disrupt, iHub Robotics raised a $20 million round in October 2023, followed by a separate pre-seed round of ₹4.3 crore (around $520,000) from U.S.-based angel investors in March 2025, intended to fund what the company describes as India's largest humanoid robotics manufacturing facility, based in Kerala. The $20 million figure, while striking for a pre-revenue hardware startup, is consistently reported across several independent outlets rather than appearing only in a single aggregator, though it is worth noting that detailed terms of that round haven't been broken down publicly. According to the founders, the company currently produces around 300 humanoid robots per month at its Kalamassery facility, with plans to scale that capacity further over the next two years.
The company has signed MoUs with EY Global and SAP Germany, alongside several Indian IT and industrial companies, and is reportedly setting up an industrial humanoid R&D centre in Bengaluru, with a US office planned before the end of 2026. iHub Robotics has stated it aims to create over 150 new jobs over a two-year period as it scales manufacturing.
Sastra Robotics — Robotic Test Automation for Electronics and HMI Systems
Sastra Robotics builds robotic manipulators that mimic human hand and finger movements to automate the functional testing of physical devices — particularly touchscreens, infotainment systems, and Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) used in cars, consumer electronics, and avionics.
How it started
Sastra Robotics was founded in 2013 at the Kochi Startup Village by Aronin Ponnappan, Achu Wilson, and Akhil Asokan, three engineering graduates from the Government Engineering College in Palakkad's batch of 2012. According to one of the founders, the trio incorporated the company with just ₹1 lakh, which they used to build their first two robots.
The company's origin problem was specific and practical: testing Human-Machine Interfaces — touchscreens, buttons, knobs, voice commands — in vehicles and consumer electronics is a slow, manual, and repetitive process. According to the founders, R&D teams historically spent around 2,500 hours over 250 days to get a product ready for launch. Sastra's pitch was to bring that down to roughly 250 hours using robotic test automation.
What the company has built
Sastra Robotics's core product line is its Robotic Automation Framework (RAF) — a robotics, AI, and analytics-based system for validating Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) testing of in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems and similar interfaces. Its QUACO product family offers various robotic hardware configurations designed to replicate real human actions like tapping, swiping, and pressing, paired with a cloud-based software toolkit for standardised validation and data management across a product's lifecycle.
The company has historically described productivity gains in the range of 12 to 20 times more testing throughput compared to manual methods, with up to 70% reduction in regression testing cycle times and up to 90% reduction in testing costs, according to the company's own published figures.
Traction and validation
Sastra Robotics counts Robert Bosch, HCL, Tech Mahindra, Lockheed Martin, and Honeywell among its enterprise clients. In 2019, the company signed an MoU with Lockheed Martin for avionics testing solutions and received the COSIDICI National Award for technological innovation. In 2022, it entered a partnership with Bosch through the DNA Accelerator Program, and in 2023, it signed an agreement to export 150 robots for a public sector department in the UK.
The company has received multiple early recognitions, including the TiE50 Award from TiE Silicon Valley in 2017 for robotics innovation, and Best Startup Awards from two successive Kerala Chief Ministers — Oommen Chandy and Pinarayi Vijayan — at different points in its growth.
Funding and structure
In 2021, as part of a global expansion, Sastra Robotics' business was taken over by SGBI Inc., a US entity headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with subsidiary operations continuing in Kochi and the UK. Sastra Robotics has operated at a comparatively small funding scale relative to the other companies in this piece — PitchBook and CB Insights both put total funding in the range of $160,000–$185,000 from a small group of angel and institutional investors, including Bharat Petroleum, the Bosch DNA Nxt Startup Alliance Program, IIIT-H Foundation, and the Kerala Startup Mission. The company reported annual revenue of approximately ₹1.82 crore as of March 2024, and currently employs between 11 and 50 people in its India operations, according to available company profile data.
Genrobotics — Robots That Replace Humans in Hazardous Sanitation Work
Genrobotics builds robotic and AI systems designed to remove humans from physically hazardous and degrading work — most notably manhole and sewer cleaning, a task historically performed manually in India despite being illegal under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers Act, 2013.
How it started
Genrobotics traces back to 2015, when four mechanical engineering students at MES Engineering College in Kuttippuram — Vimal Govind MK, Arun George, Nikhil NP, and Rashid Bin Abdulla Khan — built a powered exoskeleton as a college project, an "Iron Man suit" intended to help lift weights and assist amputees. After graduating in 2017 and taking up corporate jobs, the founders learned about a manual scavenging death and were struck by how little they understood the issue. As one founder later recalled, in their village there had been no manhole system, only septic tanks — they hadn't even known what a manhole was. That gap in awareness, once closed, became the company's founding motivation.
The team approached the Kerala government and built their first proof of concept — a wooden prototype — with funding from the Kerala Startup Mission. Genrobotics was formally registered in June 2017, with the Kerala Water Authority as its first client. The company is headquartered in Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum).
What the company has built
Genrobotics's flagship product is Bandicoot, described as the world's first robotic scavenger. The robot uses four robotic legs and a multi-functional arm to enter manholes, sewers, and storm drains, lift covers, and remove waste and sediment — all operated by a human from a safe distance above ground, using a simple interface built in collaboration with Google so that even operators with limited literacy can use it. Bandicoot launched its beta version in January 2018, was formally introduced in February 2018, and a later version, Bandicoot 2.0, was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi in October 2018, in the presence of UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
Beyond Bandicoot, the company has built Wilboar, a robot for cleaning sewage treatment plant (STP) wells where waste accumulates at depths of 10–15 metres in oxygen-deficient, toxic-gas environments. The company has also expanded into healthcare with G-Gaiter, a robot-assisted gait training device designed to help recovering paraplegics regain mobility — a notable diversification from the company's original sanitation focus into physical medicine and rehabilitation. Genrobotics now organises its work across four divisions: Sanitation Tech, Medical and Mobility, Research and Development, and Defence and Aerospace.
Traction and validation
According to the company, more than 300 Bandicoot units are currently operating across 37 sites in 19 states and three union territories of India, having collectively cleaned more than 6,000 manholes. Genrobotics has stated its goal is to eventually deploy Bandicoot across all roughly 5,000 urban local bodies in India.
The company has also worked to shift the language used around this work — proposing the term "robohole" in place of "manhole," on the basis that "manhole" implies a man must enter. The Indian government has since officially adopted the term "machine hole."
Genrobotics has received a number of awards, including the Swachhata Startup Award for Bandicoot, the BIRAC Innovator Award for Innovation with High Social Impact, and recognition in Forbes India's 30 Under 30 Asia list for its founders. The company was also selected among the top three Indian startups at a global AI summit in 2023.
Funding and scale
According to reporting from YourStory, Inc42, and Analytics India Magazine, Genrobotics had raised approximately $3 million in total funding as of its 2022 round, from investors including Unicorn India Ventures, SEA Fund, and personal investment from Anand Mahindra and Rajan Anandan, former Vice President at Google. In 2022, SaaS company Zoho invested ₹20 crore (approximately $2.5 million) in the company, led personally by Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu, who described the investment as part of Zoho's broader commitment to supporting home-grown deep-tech R&D. Tracxn's more recent aggregation puts total funding at approximately $5.88 million across seven rounds as of 2026, though this later figure is harder to independently verify against primary press coverage. According to figures reported by the company, Genrobotics generated revenue of approximately ₹12.73 crore by FY21, growing to close to ₹20 crore in FY22, with a reported profit of approximately ₹6 crore that year. The company has stated it serves customers in the UK, Malaysia, UAE, and South Korea, in addition to its work across India.
What These Four Companies Tell Us About Robotics in Kerala
Looking at EyeROV, iHub Robotics, Sastra Robotics, and Genrobotics together, a few patterns stand out.
They solve narrow, hardware-heavy problems that are hard to outsource. None of these companies are building generic software products. Underwater inspection, humanoid service robots, HMI test automation, and confined-space sanitation robotics all require deep, specific hardware and controls engineering — the kind of work that's slow to build and difficult for a larger company to replicate quickly from scratch.
They were built by engineers who knew the problem first, then the business. In each case, the founding teams came from technical or engineering backgrounds — IIT and ocean engineering for EyeROV, hands-on hardware tinkering for iHub Robotics, a shared engineering education at Government Engineering College Palakkad for Sastra Robotics, and a college exoskeleton project at MES Engineering College for Genrobotics. The businesses appear to have followed from solving a concrete technical problem, not the other way around.
Government and institutional backing has played a meaningful role. All four companies have, at different points, worked with government bodies, defence research organisations, or state-run programs — DRDO for EyeROV, BSF interest for iHub Robotics, Kerala Startup Mission grants for Sastra Robotics, and direct collaboration with the Kerala Water Authority and Kerala Startup Mission for Genrobotics, whose Bandicoot 2.0 was launched personally by the Prime Minister. Kerala's deliberate positioning of robotics as a priority sector appears to have created real institutional pathways for these companies, not just funding.
Some of these companies are solving problems with a clear social dimension, not just a commercial one. Genrobotics in particular set out to address manual scavenging — a practice that is illegal in India but persists due to inadequate infrastructure and enforcement. Its work sits at the intersection of robotics, labour rights, and public sanitation policy, which is a different kind of mission than the infrastructure-inspection or service-automation focus of the other three companies.
Scale and stage vary significantly. EyeROV, iHub Robotics, and Genrobotics have all raised meaningful venture capital and scaled their teams and deployments substantially, while Sastra Robotics has operated longer but at a smaller scale, with its global business now run out of the US. This is a useful reminder that "robotics startup from Kerala" doesn't describe a single kind of company — these four operate in different markets, at different scales, with different growth trajectories and different motivations.
Why This Matters for Kerala's Tech Ecosystem
Kerala's positioning of robotics as a state priority sector isn't happening in isolation. Zoho has backed two separate Kochi and Trivandrum robotics companies as part of its own deep-tech push — acquiring Asimov Robotics and investing ₹20 crore in Genrobotics — and has partnered with the Kerala Startup Mission to support its Deep Tech Product Studio initiative. KSUM is also reportedly planning a new emerging-technology hub within Technopark Phase IV, intended to support startups in AI, robotics, renewable energy, and health tech with prototyping labs and incubation facilities.
For engineers and researchers in Kochi and Trivandrum, this points to a slowly maturing local ecosystem — one where hardware and robotics careers don't necessarily require relocating to Bengaluru or Pune.
Where to Find Roles at Kerala Robotics Companies
- Hunt Your Tribe – Kerala Jobs — Indexed directly from company career pages, updated continuously
- Wellfound – India Robotics Jobs — Startup-focused, equity-transparent
- Kerala Startup Mission – Startup Directory — Browse registered deep-tech and robotics startups across the state
Published: June 24, 2026 | blog.huntyourtribe.com
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