Startup Deep Dive : SP Robotic Works — it raised $3 million but files just Rs 1.5 crore in revenue

SP Robotic Works says it has touched more than 250,000 young lives since 2012, and in July 2021 it persuaded a group of investors that included HCL co-founder Ajai Chowdhry to back that story with a $3 million Series A round. Its most recent public financial filing tells a smaller story: for the year to March 2023, the company itself booked just ₹1.5 crore ($156,000) in revenue, about a fifth less than the year before.

Neither number is false. But the gap between them is the real subject of this piece. SP Robotic Works is, at once, a nationally recognised STEM-education brand with dozens of “Maker Lab” centres, an AI-tutoring platform and a decade of press coverage, and a private limited company whose own Registrar of Companies filings show a modest, shrinking top line. Understanding the business means keeping those two accounts separate, and asking which one a given number is actually describing.

Quick facts

What they do

SP Robotic Works sells structured STEM courses in robotics, coding, drones, electronics, VR/AR and app development to school-age children, roughly ages 7 to 17, bundled with hands-on hardware kits. Delivery runs on two tracks that the company is trying to knit together: an AI-assisted online platform called SPARKY, and a network of physical “SP Robotics Maker Lab” centres, most of them run by franchise partners rather than the company itself. In 2020 it added a third, smaller line, TechLadder, offering machine-learning and VR/AR certificate courses to working professionals and graduates rather than schoolchildren.

The origin

Sneha Priya and Pranavan met on a college bus. Both were second-semester Electrical and Electronics Engineering students at College of Engineering, Guindy, in Chennai; he was already fielding manual robots in inter-college competitions, she was working on autonomous ones. They paired up, split the work along the same lines they later split the company – he took mechanics and electronics, she took programming – and, finding the components sold in Chennai’s markets unreliable, started fabricating their own boards at Ritchie Street, the city’s wholesale electronics bazaar. A single competition robot cost them around ₹10,000 to build. By their third year they were making prize money and component sales worth more than ₹1 lakh a month, and in 2010 they put that trade on a free website under the name SP Robotic.

The founding insight came a little later, from watching their own peers quit. Final-year engineering students who had grown up on their robots dropped the hobby the moment campus placements began; robotics, they realised, was a young person’s game only if you caught people before the exam-and-job treadmill did. That reframed the business from selling components to competitive hobbyists into teaching STEM concepts to much younger children, and in 2012 – the same year they married – they registered SP Robotic Works as a private limited company, opening a 1,500-square-foot office in Chennai’s K K Nagar with seven employees.

The struggle years

Growth in the first phase was real but slow. It took roughly three years after incorporation for the company to reach ₹1 crore in annual turnover, in 2015, and another round of ₹2 crore in angel funding in 2016 to keep expanding beyond a single Chennai centre. None of that involved institutional venture capital; SPRW ran on founder capital, prize money and small cheques for its first nine years.

The more serious setback came from the model itself. As the company opened dozens of centres run by different franchise partners and instructors, it found that teaching quality varied sharply from location to location – a problem the founders later described, without much softening, as “the weakest link in today’s education system”: inconsistent training that differed from trainer to trainer. That was not a one-off crisis but a structural flaw in a franchised, people-dependent business, and it is what eventually pushed the company to invest in software (SPARKY) to standardise lessons rather than rely purely on human instructors.

Then came March 2020. SP Robotic Works had just come off what it describes as the peak of its marketing push, with close to 25,000 bookings across roughly 75 centres nationwide. The national COVID-19 lockdown shut every one of those centres almost overnight, cutting off the offline footfall the entire franchise economics depended on. A business built around physical Maker Labs suddenly had no physical labs to run.

The turning point

What happened next is the event the rest of the company’s growth story hangs on. With its centres closed, SP Robotic Works pushed everything onto its online platform – free webinars, online demonstrations, remote kit-based projects – and, by the company’s own account, online enrolments grew by close to 700% over the following seven months compared with the same period a year earlier. Co-founder Pranavan later said the “huge surge” showed students could build real projects, from home security systems to contactless sanitiser dispensers, without setting foot in a centre. That claim comes from the company’s own telling and has not been independently audited, but the sequence of events that followed it is on the public record: physical centres reopened in phases from January 2021 as “experience centres” rather than the sole channel, and within seven months of that reopening plan, in July 2021, SPRW closed its first and so far only institutional funding round.

The money behind it

SP Robotic Works has raised about $4 million (roughly ₹38.4 crore, converting at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026) across seed, angel and one priced round in its history, according to the company’s own funding announcement, a figure Tracxn’s database corroborates at $4.08 million.

• Series A – $3 million, announced 30 July 2021: led by Mount Judi India Growth Fund, the company’s first institutional lead investor (SP Robotic Works press release, July 2021).
• Other Series A participants: BCCL (the Times Group’s investment arm), Indian Angel Network, Native Angels Network and Malabar Angels, alongside named angels Ajai Chowdhry (co-founder, HCL) and Raman Roy (chairman and managing director, Quatrro) – both individuals lending sector and governance credibility rather than just capital (company press release, July 2021).
• Earlier capital: ₹2 crore in angel funding in 2016 (The Weekend Leader, October 2019), plus additional seed and angel cheques through 2020 that make up the balance of the $4 million total.
• Stated use of funds: scale the SPARKY platform, extend the course catalogue into Math and Science, and grow headcount past 150 (company press release, July 2021).
• Valuation: not disclosed by the company or any investor in public materials found for this piece.
• Since 2021: no subsequent funding round has been reported as of September 2026; the company remains at Series A stage more than five years after that raise.

How it makes money

SP Robotic Works earns from four related but distinct channels, and the split between them matters because they carry very different economics.

• Direct-to-consumer courses and kits: families buy age-tiered programmes – Junior (7+), Senior (10+) and Super Senior (14+) – bundled with hardware kits priced, historically, from about ₹7,000 to ₹50,000 depending on the technology covered (The Weekend Leader, October 2019; company website).
• Franchised Maker Lab centres: a franchise partner puts up ₹15-25 lakh for the franchise fee, kit stock and a 1,200 sq ft fitted-out centre, and the company’s own franchise page tells prospective partners they can expect a return on that investment within a year – an offline retail-style business bolted onto an edtech brand (company franchise page).
• SPARKY, the AI-led learning platform: positioned by the company as the fix for the trainer-quality problem described above, standardising lesson delivery online rather than leaving it to whichever instructor is on shift at a given centre (CIOL, March 2021).
• TechLadder, for adults: launched in July 2020, this line sells machine-learning and VR/AR certificate courses to graduates and working professionals, a small but distinct move beyond the core K-12 customer base (Business Standard/ANI press release, 3 July 2020).

The part people tend to get wrong is assuming SP Robotic Works “earns” in the same place it is visible. Most of the brand’s public footprint – the Maker Lab signage, the local instructors, the fees collected from parents at the centre level – sits with franchise partners, not with the parent company’s own books. The company’s revenue, on paper, is the fees and margin it captures from franchising, kit supply and its own direct online sales, not the full turnover generated across the network.

The numbers

Public, verifiable financial history for SP Robotic Works is thin, and later-year filings (FY24 and FY25) were not available in public company-registry aggregators at the time of research. The figures below mix two different measures – the company’s own “brand” turnover as reported to journalists, and its standalone statutory revenue as filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs – which is itself part of the story told above.

Net profit or loss figures for any year were not available in the free tier of any registry aggregator checked for this piece, so they are left out rather than estimated. What the standalone data does show is a company whose own filed revenue was smaller in FY23 than the “brand revenue” its founders quoted to a reporter back in FY19 – a reminder that a franchised education business’s headline numbers and its parent company’s statutory numbers can move in opposite directions.

Where the money comes from

• Channel split: online, kit-led B2C sales through SPARKY; offline learning delivered through franchised Maker Lab centres; a smaller adult-upskilling line (TechLadder) launched in 2020 (company website; Business Standard/ANI, July 2020).
• Geographic footprint: at its 2021 fundraising peak the company said it ran 75-plus centres across 27 Indian cities, later described on its own site as 83 centres across 32 cities in 13 states, alongside a franchise-specific count of “50+” Maker Labs across “27+” cities – the discrepancy likely reflects total network size versus the subset currently open to new franchisees (company press release, July 2021; company website, accessed September 2026).
• International reach: the company said its online platform had users in 14 countries, including Australia, the UAE, Singapore, Thailand and Mauritius, as of its 2021 funding round (company press release, July 2021).
• The surprise: a brand that claims to have reached 250,000-plus students and calls itself “India’s No.1 Robotics & Coding platform” on its own social channels files standalone revenue of just ₹1.5 crore – evidence that scale in reach and scale in the parent company’s own revenue are two different things in this business.

The risks

• Franchise quality control: the company’s own growth depends on partners who each put up ₹15-25 lakh and are promised a return within a year (company franchise page); the founders have separately acknowledged that inconsistent trainer quality across centres was “the weakest link” of the pre-SPARKY model (CIOL, March 2021). Any franchise partner underdelivering on teaching quality is a reputational risk for the whole national brand, not just that one centre.
• Offline dependence re-exposed: the March 2020 lockdown shut all of the company’s roughly 75 centres in one stroke after a period of heavy marketing spend (IndianWeb2, December 2020). The pivot to online worked once, by the company’s own account, but the underlying vulnerability – a franchise network reliant on physical footfall and local rent – has not gone away.
• Thin, declining standalone financials in a crowded field: SPRW’s own filed revenue fell to ₹1.5 crore in FY23, down about a fifth year-on-year, while its net worth fell 64.2% and borrowings rose 94.4% over the same period (Tracxn/ZaubaCorp filing data). That is happening in a segment Tracxn counts more than 70 funded and unfunded robotics-in-education startups in India competing in, including WhizRobo, STEMROBO, Robokart and Avishkaar – leaving little room for execution slips.

The takeaway

The lesson SP Robotic Works offers has less to do with robotics than with reading a company’s own numbers carefully. A decade of press coverage, 35-plus awards, a Series A led by a named institutional fund, and a self-description as India’s leading platform in its category can all be true at the same time as a standalone regulatory filing showing a small and shrinking revenue line. Neither fact cancels the other out; they simply measure different things – brand reach and franchise-network activity on one side, the parent company’s own booked economics on the other. For any founder building on a franchise or licensing model, and for anyone evaluating one from the outside, the discipline is to ask, every time a number is quoted, whose books it actually sits on.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded SP Robotic Works, and when?

Sneha Priya and Santhanakrishnan Pranavan, who met as engineering students at College of Engineering, Guindy in Chennai, founded SP Robotic Works in 2012, after running a robotics components website called SP Robotic since 2010 (The Weekend Leader, October 2019).

How much funding has SP Robotic Works raised?

About $4 million (roughly ₹38.4 crore) in total across seed, angel and one Series A round, the last being a $3 million round announced on 30 July 2021 and led by Mount Judi India Growth Fund (company press release, July 2021; corroborated by Tracxn at $4.08 million).

What is SPARKY?

SPARKY is SP Robotic Works’ AI-assisted online learning platform, built to deliver standardised robotics, coding and STEM lessons and reduce the variation in teaching quality that the founders said existed across their physical centres (CIOL, March 2021).

Is SP Robotic Works profitable?

This is not publicly disclosed. Its standalone filing for the year to March 2023 shows ₹1.5 crore in revenue, down about a fifth on the previous year, with no net profit or loss figure available in public registry data (Tracxn/ZaubaCorp filing data).

Does SP Robotic Works run a franchise model?

Yes. Its Maker Lab franchise requires an investment of roughly ₹15-25 lakh and 1,200 sq ft of space, and the company’s franchise page tells prospective partners they can expect to recover that investment within about a year (company franchise page, accessed September 2026).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• SP Robotic Works, “AI Based EdTech start-up SP Robotic Works raises Series A funding”, company press release, July 2021
• The Weekend Leader, “Loving robotics”, 9 October 2019
• IndianWeb2.com, “SP Robotic Works Plans to Re-Open Their Maker Labs as Experience Centers for Phase 1”, 23 December 2020
• CIOL, “How SP Robotic Works is going beyond mainstream education by providing experiential learning?”, 18 March 2021
• Business Standard/ANI press release, “SP Robotic Works launches TechLadder for professionals; expands into corporate workforce upskilling”, 3 July 2020
• Business Standard/ANI press release, “SP Robotics Maker lab opens application for franchises; plans to open 100+ offline experience centres for kids by year end”, 6 July 2022
• Tracxn, SP Robotic Works company profile, accessed September 2026
• ZaubaCorp/Tofler, statutory filing data for SP Robotic Works Private Limited (FY23), accessed September 2026
• Mount Judi, portfolio page for SP Robotic Works, accessed September 2026
• SP Robotic Works, company website (About Us and Franchise pages), accessed September 2026

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