Startup Deep Dive : Addverb — the company building 100,000 robots a year while its losses keep widening

Addverb Technologies runs a robot factory in Greater Noida built to turn out up to 100,000 machines a year, a scale the company calls the largest of its kind anywhere. In the same audited books that record that ambition, its loss widened to ₹88.95 crore (about $9.3 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) for the year ended 31 March 2025 — the second straight year in the red for a company that was solidly profitable just two years earlier.

Reliance Retail Ventures Limited owns 58.21% of Addverb, the payoff from a $132 million cheque it wrote in January 2022 that turned a six-year-old warehouse-robotics startup into one of India’s best-capitalised hardware bets. The founders came from Asian Paints, not from a robotics lab. What happened between that modest FY22 profit and the widening loss three years later — while revenue barely grew, exports exploded, and the company built two of the country’s biggest robot factories — is the story of what it actually costs to build hardware at scale in India.

Quick facts

What they do

Addverb designs, builds and sells the robots and software that move goods inside warehouses and factories: autonomous mobile robots that ferry shelves and pallets, automated storage-and-retrieval systems that stack inventory floor to ceiling, and the control software that tells all of it where to go. Its own audited accounts describe the business simply as “robotics and automation solutions in warehousing, healthcare and manufacturing,” aimed at making material handling safer, more scalable and more flexible. Customers are large retailers, consumer-goods makers and logistics operators — the kind of businesses that run big distribution centres and are trying to cut the number of people walking miles a day inside them. As per company statements reported in the press, its client list has included Reliance group companies, Flipkart, Amazon, Hindustan Unilever, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Marico, though the precise current roster is not independently disclosed.

The origin

Addverb’s founding insight did not come from a robotics lab. Sangeet Kumar and his co-founders — Prateek Jain, Satish Kumar Shukla and Bir Singh — met at Asian Paints, where they spent years automating the company’s factories and warehouses and repeatedly cut the time and manpower needed to run them. In 2015, Kumar took over as General Works Manager at Asian Paints’ Chennai plant while it was in the middle of a labour strike, and turned the operation around. The lesson the group carried out of that experience was that Indian warehouses and factories were still largely run on manual labour, and that the automation technology being sold into India was almost entirely imported, expensive and hard to service locally. In June 2016 the four of them left Asian Paints and founded Addverb in Noida to build that automation in India instead of importing it.

The struggle years

The company’s own audited numbers show two distinct hard patches, both fully disclosed and both unsoftened by management commentary. The first was structural: robotics hardware is capital-intensive, and for its first five years Addverb grew on internal cash and modest funding, reporting revenue of roughly ₹193 crore in FY21 and ₹317 crore in FY22, with thin single-digit-crore profits — a business that was real and growing, but too small and too capital-starved to build the kind of large-scale, India-made manufacturing base its founders wanted.

The second patch came after the money arrived. Having taken on Reliance as its controlling shareholder in January 2022, Addverb poured capital into two large factories, expanded into the US, Europe, Australia and Singapore, and roughly doubled its headcount-related costs. Revenue from operations, audited by Deloitte Haskins & Sells, fell from ₹416.49 crore in FY23 to ₹287.84 crore in FY24 — a 30.9% drop in the same year the company swung from a ₹4.95 crore profit to a ₹62.20 crore loss, with cash losses of ₹48.77 crore. FY25 brought a partial recovery in revenue, up 14.9% to ₹330.85 crore, but the loss widened further, to ₹88.95 crore, with cash losses climbing to ₹75.68 crore. By the end of FY25, Addverb’s cash and bank balance stood at just ₹0.22 crore, and its current liabilities exceeded its current assets — a current ratio of 0.61, down from 1.15 a year earlier. None of this is a company on the brink; it is a company whose scale-up is being funded almost entirely by debt and by its own controlling shareholder, not by operating cash flow.

The turning point

The single event that split Addverb’s history in two was Reliance Retail Ventures’ decision, announced on 18 January 2022, to pay $132 million for a 54% stake in the company — a stake that, following a further rights issue funded entirely by Reliance in FY23, now stands at 58.21%. Before the deal, in FY22, Addverb was a modest but genuinely profitable company: ₹317 crore of revenue and ₹2.43 crore of net profit, according to Entrackr’s review of the company’s regulatory filings. Three years later, in FY25, revenue had barely moved — ₹330.85 crore, up just 4.4% over three years — while the bottom line had gone from a small profit to an ₹88.95 crore loss. Reliance’s capital did not simply scale an already-working business; it financed a much bigger, much more expensive one, and the profit and loss statement absorbed the difference in the form of higher depreciation, higher finance costs and a bigger wage bill, well before the additional manufacturing capacity had translated into commensurate revenue.

The money behind it

Addverb’s funding history is short and dominated by a single backer. Before 2022 it ran largely on internal accruals and small share issuances to existing investors, including Smiti Holding and Trading Company Private Limited, a family investment vehicle linked to the Asian Paints promoter group — a detail that traces a straight line back to the founders’ old employer. The turning point was Reliance Retail Ventures’ $132 million investment for a 54% stake in January 2022, structured as a Series B round, which both Addverb’s own press release and The Robot Report describe as making Reliance the company’s largest shareholder while leaving Addverb to operate independently. Reliance topped that up with a further ₹150.11 crore rights issue in FY23, taking its stake to 58.21%, and again in FY25 with a ₹91 crore unsecured loan carrying 9% interest, used to plug a widening working-capital gap. As of June 2026, CEO Sangeet Kumar told Outlook Business that Addverb was seeking to raise more than $100 million in what would be its first major external capital raise since the Reliance deal, earmarked for humanoid and quadrupedal robots, lidar sensors and AI systems; as of that report, the round had not been confirmed as closed. Kumar has separately said an IPO remains a longer-term option once annual revenue reaches roughly ₹4,000–5,000 crore, a level he suggested could be two years away if growth holds — a threshold roughly twelve times Addverb’s actual FY25 revenue.

How it makes money

Addverb earns most of its revenue selling physical robots and automation hardware, with a smaller stream from installation and commissioning services, and a growing royalty stream charged to its own foreign subsidiaries for the right to sell its technology abroad. In FY25, product sales made up ₹331.36 crore of gross sales and services, installation and commissioning added ₹39.17 crore, and royalty income from its US, European, Australian and Singapore subsidiaries contributed ₹10.98 crore, up more than three-fold from ₹3.06 crore a year earlier. The part that is easy to miss: Addverb’s international business is not mostly direct export sales to overseas customers. It manufactures in India and sells a large share of that output to its own wholly owned subsidiaries abroad, which then resell and service it locally — a standard structure for a global manufacturer, but one that means the headline “exports” figure is substantially an internal transfer between the parent and its own units rather than arm’s-length third-party sales. Costs are dominated by materials — cost of materials consumed plus purchases of stock-in-trade ran to about 64% of revenue in FY25 — followed by employee costs, which climbed to ₹116.47 crore, or 35.2% of revenue, up from 24.0% two years earlier as the company staffed up for scale. Depreciation and finance costs, both direct consequences of the factory build-out, roughly tripled between FY23 and FY25, and together they explain most of the swing from profit to loss.

The numbers

Figures below are drawn from Addverb Technologies Limited’s Deloitte Haskins & Sells-audited standalone financial statements, disclosed as part of Reliance Industries’ regulatory filings. All figures in ₹ crore.

Where the money comes from

The clearest split in Addverb’s business is geographic, and it has flipped in three years. In FY23, 96.8% of revenue (₹403.30 crore of ₹416.49 crore) came from within India, with exports a rounding error at ₹13.19 crore. By FY25 that had reversed sharply: India accounted for ₹189.91 crore (57.4%) and revenue from outside India had grown to ₹140.94 crore, or 42.6% of the total. The surprise sits inside that export number. Of the ₹161.60 crore of FY25 revenue booked with related parties, ₹129.73 crore — roughly 92% of the entire “outside India” figure — was billed to Addverb’s own wholly owned overseas subsidiaries in the US, the Netherlands, Australia and Singapore, not to unrelated foreign buyers directly. Reliance group companies (Reliance Industries, Reliance Retail Ventures and fellow Reliance subsidiaries) accounted for a further ₹31.87 crore, or 9.6% of revenue. Put together, nearly half of Addverb’s FY25 revenue was transacted with a related party of one kind or another — its own foreign units or its controlling shareholder’s group — which is not unusual for a company mid-way through building an overseas sales network, but it does mean the “global expansion” story is, for now, largely an intercompany one.

The risks

Three risks stand out directly from Addverb’s own disclosures. First, liquidity: the company closed FY25 with just ₹0.22 crore of cash, a current ratio of 0.61, and gross debt of ₹321.23 crore, funded through bank overdrafts, a term loan and a ₹91 crore unsecured loan from its own holding company — a structure that works only for as long as Reliance keeps extending credit. Second, tax exposure: the Income Tax Department raised a demand of ₹25.35 crore for assessment year 2022-23, which Addverb is appealing, on top of an earlier ₹8.69 crore demand for assessment year 2020-21 that was quashed by the Commissioner of Income Tax (Appeals) in August 2023 but which the tax department has since appealed to the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal in Delhi — a reminder that a company this dependent on related-party transactions attracts sustained transfer-pricing scrutiny. Third, execution risk on new bets: Addverb is simultaneously trying to scale warehouse robotics, enter semiconductor manufacturing equipment with a stated $100 million revenue target, and build humanoid and quadrupedal robots, all while its core business has not yet turned the FY23-FY24 revenue dip into consistent profitable growth.

The takeaway

The lesson in Addverb’s numbers is not that Reliance’s money was wasted; it is that capital and capacity arrive years before the revenue and margin needed to justify them, and a founder who mistakes one for the other will misread the company’s health completely. Addverb went from a small, real profit to a widening loss not because the underlying demand for warehouse automation in India collapsed, but because it chose to build ₹200-crore factories, a global subsidiary network and new product lines all at once, funded by debt and a patient majority shareholder rather than by its own cash flow. That is a legitimate strategy for a company trying to become a ₹4,000-crore business — but it only works if the shareholder’s patience outlasts the scale-up, and if the same audited numbers that show today’s losses eventually show the growth that was supposed to follow the spending.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Addverb Technologies?

Reliance Retail Ventures Limited owns 58.21% of Addverb as of the company’s FY25 audited accounts, after first investing $132 million for a 54% stake in January 2022 and later increasing its holding through a rights issue. The remaining shares are held by Smiti Holding and Trading Company Private Limited (21.86%), Asiana Fund I (5.98%) and other shareholders including the founders.

Is Addverb profitable?

No, not currently. Addverb reported a net loss of ₹62.20 crore in FY24 and a wider loss of ₹88.95 crore in FY25, according to its Deloitte-audited financial statements. Its last reported profitable year on these audited figures was FY23, with a net profit of ₹4.95 crore.

How much has Addverb raised in funding?

Its best-documented capital raise is Reliance Retail Ventures’ $132 million investment in January 2022 for a 54% stake, followed by a ₹150.11 crore rights issue in FY23 that lifted Reliance’s holding to 58.21%. As of June 2026, Addverb was reported to be seeking a further $100 million round, which had not been confirmed as closed.

Does Addverb make its robots in India?

Yes. Addverb manufactures at facilities in the Noida region of Uttar Pradesh, including a roughly ₹200 crore factory called Bot-Verse that the company says can produce around 100,000 robots a year, alongside an earlier, smaller unit. It also has subsidiaries and offices in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia and Singapore that sell and service its products abroad.

Is Addverb planning an IPO?

Not immediately. CEO Sangeet Kumar has said an initial public offering is a longer-term option that would likely follow once annual revenue reaches around ₹4,000–5,000 crore, a level he estimated in 2024 could be roughly two years away if growth continued — well above Addverb’s actual FY25 revenue of ₹330.85 crore. The company converted from a private to a public limited company during FY25, a step often taken ahead of a future listing.

Sources

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

• Addverb Technologies, “Reliance Acquires 54% Stake In Addverb Technologies For $132 Million”, addverb.com, January 2022
• The Robot Report, “Addverb Technologies brings in $132 million investment”, therobotreport.com, January 2022
• Entrackr, “Reliance-backed Addverb’s scale touches Rs 317 Cr in FY22, remains profitable”, entrackr.com, September 2022
• BusinessToday, “India’s coolest start ups: Meet the founders of automated solutions provider Addverb Technologies”, businesstoday.in, January 2024
• BusinessToday, “Addverb’s robotics revolution: CEO Sangeet Kumar discusses growth, innovation, Intel partnership, future plans”, businesstoday.in, August 2024
• BusinessToday, “Addverb Technologies launches robot manufacturing unit in Noida”, businesstoday.in, March 2021
• Business Standard, “Addverb’s mega robot-making unit in UP touted to power 3,000 jobs”, business-standard.com, June 2023
• Reliance Industries Limited, “Addverb Technologies Limited — Financial Statements 2023-24”, ril.com, disclosed August 2024
• Reliance Industries Limited, “Addverb Technologies Limited — Financial Statements 2024-25”, ril.com, disclosed July 2025
• Outlook Business, “Reliance-Backed Addverb Plans $100 Mn Fundraise to Build Humanoid Robots”, outlookbusiness.com, June 2026
• Addverb Technologies, “Addverb Enters Semiconductor Equipment, Targets $100 Mn Revenue”, addverb.com, 2026
• Addverb Technologies, “Addverb Eyes Rs 800 Cr Biz This Fiscal”, addverb.com, 2026
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, September 2026

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