Startup Deep Dive : EyeROV — the Kochi robot-maker that had to earn trust before it could replace a diver

In September 2025 the Indian Navy signed a Rs 47 crore ($5.3 million) contract for underwater robots with a company that had spent its first four years running on a single $210,840 grant and two small government science grants. EyeROV, the Kochi-based maker of the robots, says the hardest part was never keeping a machine alive at 300 metres of depth — it was persuading a port operator or a naval officer to trust a robot over a diver.

Nine years after two engineering-school friends built a proof-of-concept in a lab in Kerala, that trust deficit has turned into a business with more than 80 customers, over 150 completed inspection projects, and a single defence order worth more than a decade’s worth of its earlier fundraising combined. This is the story of how EyeROV got there, what its numbers actually say, and where the business still has to prove itself.

Quick facts

What they do

EyeROV builds remotely operated underwater vehicles, autonomous underwater vehicles and unmanned surface vehicles, and sells the inspection outcome as much as the hardware. Ports, oil and gas companies, hydropower operators, shipping lines and defence agencies need to know the condition of a ship hull, a dam wall, a subsea pipeline or a harbour floor, work that has traditionally required trained divers to go down and look. EyeROV’s machines do the same job from the surface, streaming video, sonar and ultrasonic-thickness data back to an operator, and its own AI layer flags likely defects in that footage automatically rather than leaving a human to scrub through hours of recording (Inc42, accessed September 2026).

The origin

Johns T Mathai and Kannappa Palaniappan P knew each other from their undergraduate years at the College of Engineering, Trivandrum between 2006 and 2010, where they ran a robotics club together before going their separate ways (Outlook Business, accessed September 2026). Mathai, an IIT Delhi alumnus, went on to work at Samsung R&D and then at the industrial-automation startup GreyOrange. Palaniappan, who studied ocean engineering at IIT Madras, worked at Saint-Gobain and then as a marine scientist at the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) (The Better India, accessed September 2026).

It was at NIOT that Palaniappan saw the problem up close. A ship needed a hull inspection after a collision, and the job could only be done by specialised divers — who took a couple of days to arrive, leaving the vessel idle in the meantime (CXO Digital Pulse, accessed September 2026). Warehouses, factories and hospitals were being handed over to robots; underwater inspection was not. The two reconnected, and over six to nine months built a proof-of-concept device that became Tuna, a micro-ROV rated to 100 metres, weighing under 10 kilograms, carrying 6,000-lumen lights and running for more than three hours at a 2-knot cruise speed (The Better India, accessed September 2026). The Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory, a DRDO facility, placed the first order for it on 14 September 2018 — the company’s first paying customer (The Better India, accessed September 2026).

The struggle years

Two problems slowed EyeROV down for years after that first sale, and neither was really about engineering. The first was trust. As Mathai put it, “the technology was hard, but the harder challenge was trust” — convincing an oil major, a port authority or a shipping line to swap out a diver for a machine built by an unproven Indian startup was, by his own account, a longer sale than building the machine itself (BizzBuzz, accessed September 2026). Government validation from DRDO’s own labs eventually helped shift that perception with commercial buyers, but it took years of demonstrations and trial projects to get there (BizzBuzz, accessed September 2026).

The second problem was structural. Co-founder Palaniappan has pointed to an underwater-robotics ecosystem in India that was, and largely still is, immature: reliable underwater communication still depends on tethered, cabled links he calls “a necessary evil,” locally-made underwater-rated components were scarce, and the cost of hardware research and development was high enough to keep many investors away (Outlook Business, accessed September 2026). That combination shows up starkly in the company’s early funding record: after GAIL’s $210,840 seed cheque in December 2018, EyeROV’s next disclosed capital did not arrive until May 2022 and October 2022, in the form of two Department of Science and Technology grants of $360,000 and $357,790 (Inc42 funding tracker, accessed September 2026). For roughly three and a half years, in other words, the company ran on one commercial seed check and government science funding rather than venture capital — and even in 2025, sensor payloads for its ROVs still had to be imported because no Indian vendor makes them (Inc42, accessed September 2026).

The turning point

The moment that changed EyeROV’s trajectory was commercial rather than technical: a Rs 47 crore ($5.3 million) order from the Indian Navy for its Trout ROV, a 300-metre-rated, military-grade vehicle built for deep-sea missions and tested in conditions ranging from turbulent open seas to the Antarctic, awarded around 30 September 2025 through the government’s Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) pathway (Inc42 Buzz, accessed September 2026; BizzBuzz, accessed September 2026, both corroborate the Rs 47 crore figure). Set against what came before, the scale is stark: across seven years to that point, EyeROV’s disclosed equity and grant funding totalled a few million dollars raised in small increments; this single hardware order was worth more than all of it combined.

The effect showed up quickly. Within weeks, coverage of the company cited more than 150 completed projects and over 80 customers, up from the 100-plus projects reported a year or so earlier (Inc42 Buzz, accessed September 2026). By February 2026, Mathai was describing the Navy order and “surging demand” in energy and infrastructure inspection as having brought the company to “a clear inflection point,” in comments made as EyeROV closed a fresh pre-Series A round (India Tech Report, 5 February 2026). A single defence contract, in short, did what years of pilot projects had struggled to do: it gave outside buyers and investors a number they could not argue with.

The money behind it

EyeROV’s fundraising has been built in small, mostly non-dilutive steps rather than one large venture round, and it is worth separating equity and grant funding from the Rs 47 crore Navy order, which is a commercial contract rather than an investment (Inc42 funding tracker, accessed September 2026):

• December 2018 — $210,840 seed from GAIL, the state-run gas major and the company’s first institutional believer (Inc42 funding tracker).
• May 2022 — $360,000 and October 2022 — $357,790, both from the Department of Science and Technology, non-dilutive grants that kept deep-tech R&D funded through the ecosystem’s thinnest years (Inc42 funding tracker).
• January 2023 — an iDEX grant of undisclosed value, tied to the Defence India Startup Challenge (Inc42 funding tracker).
• August 2024 — Rs 10 crore (about $1.2 million) pre-Series A, led by Unicorn India Ventures, EyeROV’s first meaningful venture-capital round (Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• 5 February 2026 — Rs 13 crore pre-Series A, co-led by AWE Funds and Unicorn India Ventures, earmarked for R&D and international expansion (India Tech Report, 5 February 2026).

Reports differ on whether the August 2024 and February 2026 rounds were two distinct raises or two tranches of one extended pre-Series A — Inc42’s company profile lists the Rs 10 crore round separately from the Rs 13 crore raise India Tech Report reported in February 2026, and this piece treats them as two disclosed events rather than reconciling them into one figure. Added together, EyeROV’s disclosed equity and grant funding comes to roughly $3.5–3.6 million across six rounds since 2018 (Inc42 funding tracker), a total dwarfed by the single Rs 47 crore Navy order that followed. AWE Funds’ Seema Chaturvedi framed the investment thesis around offshore infrastructure — pipelines, subsea cables and ports — as an area where deep technology can produce, in her words, both strong returns and real-world impact (India Tech Report, 5 February 2026). No valuation has been disclosed; Tracxn lists it as redacted as of April 2025, and Mathai has spoken of eventually raising a $10 million Series A (India Tech Report, 5 February 2026; Tracxn, accessed September 2026).

How it makes money

EyeROV earns in two ways, and both are built around replacing a diver rather than just selling a gadget:

• Inspection-as-a-service: EyeROV sends its own crew and equipment to inspect dams, ports, ship hulls and pipelines, then delivers a report identifying defects and recommended repairs — the customer pays for the outcome, not the hardware (Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• Direct hardware sales: ROVs, USVs and AUVs are sold outright to defence agencies, disaster-response forces such as the NDRF and police, and research institutions that want to operate the equipment themselves (Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• Product line: Tuna (100-metre observation ROV), Trout (300-metre military-grade ROV), the Alpha unmanned surface vehicle for water sampling and depth measurement, a long-range tunnel-and-pipeline ROV with roughly 10 km of reach, and Evap, an AI analytics layer that flags defects in inspection video automatically (Inc42, accessed September 2026; Inc42 Buzz, accessed September 2026).
• Where the margin sits: around 70–80% of each vehicle is manufactured domestically; the remaining underwater-rated sensor payloads are imported because no Indian supplier makes them yet, which keeps a meaningful share of input cost tied to currency and import cycles rather than local manufacturing (Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• The part people get wrong: EyeROV is not competing on the price of a diver’s day-rate. Its own executives describe the harder sell as trust in automation for safety-critical, expensive infrastructure — meaning the sales cycle, not the unit cost, is what has historically slowed revenue (BizzBuzz, accessed September 2026).
• Intellectual property: five patents granted and five more applications under evaluation, underpinning the AI-analytics and vehicle-design work rather than just the hardware (Inc42, accessed September 2026).

The numbers

EyeROV is privately held and does not publish audited results; the figures below come from corporate-data trackers reading its Registrar of Companies filings, corroborated across two independent sources, and should be read as indicative rather than company-confirmed:

Two independent trackers, Tofler and TheCompanyCheck, converge on the same broad picture: revenue roughly doubling year-on-year through FY25, and the company swinging from a small net loss in FY24 to a small net profit, with Tofler additionally citing an operating margin of about 13.0% and return on equity of about 2.8% for the latest year (Tofler, accessed September 2026; TheCompanyCheck, accessed September 2026). This piece could not independently verify audited revenue or profit figures for FY22 or FY23 through public trackers this session; a multi-year table pulled from one legal-entity database showed internally inconsistent figures (EBITDA exceeding revenue in several years), so those numbers have been left out rather than reported. Separately, EyeROV’s own executives have described revenue as growing “two- to three-fold almost every year” and say the company was EBITDA- and PAT-positive in its most recent full year, without breaking out the underlying figures — a company-stated claim, not an independently verified one (Inc42, accessed September 2026).

Where the money comes from

EyeROV’s revenue is concentrated by customer type rather than by geography or product line:

• Roughly 75% of customers are government bodies and public-sector undertakings — including the Indian Navy, DRDO, the Indian Coast Guard, CSIR, NCPOR, ONGC, BPCL and GAIL (Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• The remaining commercial base includes Maersk and the Adani Group, alongside other maritime and hydropower operators (BizzBuzz, accessed September 2026).
• Geographic footprint: primary operations in India, with a presence in the Middle East and Europe and stated plans to expand into Southeast Asia (Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• Scale reached: more than 80 customers and over 150 completed projects across roughly five countries as of the Navy contract announcement (Inc42 Buzz, accessed September 2026).
• The surprise: a deep-tech hardware company built around India’s coastline earns three-quarters of its business from the state rather than from the private shipping and energy majors it was originally pitched to serve, which makes government procurement cycles — not private industry adoption — the more important swing factor in its near-term revenue (Inc42, accessed September 2026).

The risks

• Concentration in government and defence procurement: with roughly three-quarters of customers in the public sector, EyeROV’s revenue is exposed to tendering timelines, budget cycles and defence-acquisition processes that move far more slowly than a venture-backed company’s growth targets. Mathai has said as much directly: “it takes 10-12 years to scale a deeptech company, but if VCs are coming in, their timeline is 5-6 years for generating returns” (Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• Import dependence on sensor payloads: even with 70–80% of each vehicle built domestically, the underwater-rated sensor payloads that make the remaining share are imported because no Indian vendor currently makes them, tying a meaningful slice of unit cost and lead time to overseas suppliers and currency movements (Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• Direct competition for the same niche: India’s underwater-robotics market is small enough that EyeROV names its rivals directly rather than facing diffuse competition — Xera Robotics and Planys Technologies both compete for the same inspection and defence contracts (Inc42, accessed September 2026; CXO Digital Pulse, accessed September 2026).

The takeaway

EyeROV’s arc is a reminder that in hardware-heavy deep tech, the technology is often the easier half of the problem. The company built a working underwater robot within nine months of starting; it then spent years afterward convincing buyers who had always used divers that a machine could be trusted with the same job. What eventually broke that stalemate was not a better sensor or a cheaper unit cost — it was a large, credible customer, the Indian Navy, putting its own money behind the answer. For any founder building something genuinely new, the lesson generalises: line up the small, patient, non-dilutive wins first, because they are what eventually buy you the one big client whose decision everyone else copies.

Frequently asked questions

What does EyeROV make?

EyeROV builds remotely operated vehicles, autonomous underwater vehicles and unmanned surface vehicles for underwater inspection — including the Tuna, Trout and Alpha models — plus an AI analytics platform, Evap, that flags defects automatically in inspection footage (Inc42, accessed September 2026).

How much funding has EyeROV raised?

Disclosed equity and grant funding totals roughly $3.5-3.6 million across six rounds since a $210,840 seed cheque from GAIL in December 2018, most recently a Rs 13 crore pre-Series A in February 2026 co-led by AWE Funds and Unicorn India Ventures. That figure excludes the separate Rs 47 crore ($5.3 million) Indian Navy order signed around 30 September 2025, which is a commercial contract rather than an investment (Inc42 funding tracker, accessed September 2026; India Tech Report, 5 February 2026).

Is EyeROV profitable?

Corporate-data trackers show a net loss of Rs 11.64 lakh in FY24 turning into a net profit margin of about 3.0% in FY25, on revenue that grew from Rs 3.87 crore to Rs 8.8 crore (Tofler and TheCompanyCheck, accessed September 2026). Company executives separately describe the business as EBITDA- and PAT-positive in its most recent full year, without disclosing the underlying figures (Inc42, accessed September 2026).

Who are EyeROV’s main customers?

About 75% of its customer base is government bodies and public-sector undertakings — the Indian Navy, DRDO, the Coast Guard, CSIR, NCPOR, ONGC, BPCL and GAIL — with commercial clients including Maersk and the Adani Group making up the rest (Inc42, accessed September 2026; BizzBuzz, accessed September 2026).

Is EyeROV a listed company?

No. EyeROV, legally IROV Technologies Private Limited, is privately held and unlisted, with no disclosed valuation as of September 2026 (Tracxn, accessed September 2026).

Sources

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

• Inc42, “How EyeROV Is Taking India Through The Unchartered Waters Of Marine Robotics,” accessed September 2026
• Inc42, EyeROV funding-round tracker (company funding page), accessed September 2026
• Inc42 Buzz, “Robotics EyeROV Bags INR 47 Cr Indian Navy Contract For Its Advanced Underwater ROVs,” accessed September 2026
• The Better India, “IIT alumni’s Kerala start-up unveils India’s 1st underwater drone,” accessed September 2026
• BizzBuzz, “EyeROV’s underwater robots redefine inspection tech,” accessed September 2026
• Outlook Business, “How Kochi Start-Up EyeROV is Powering India’s Underwater Drone Technology,” accessed September 2026
• CXO Digital Pulse, “EyeROV Charts India’s Course in the High-Stakes World of Marine Robotics,” accessed September 2026
• India Tech Report, “EyeROV, Indian marine robotics startup, raises funding for autonomous ocean surveillance,” 5 February 2026
• PR Newswire, “EyeROV: Indian Deep-Tech Startup Showcases its Underwater Drones to World Leaders,” September 2026
• Tofler, IROV Technologies Private Limited company financial filings, accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, IROV Technologies Private Limited FY2026 company profile (MCA-filed financials), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, EyeROV company profile — funding rounds and valuation status, accessed September 2026

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