Startup Deep Dive : Ati Motors — the AMR maker that got funded by shrinking its ambition

Ati Motors builds robots that drag trolleys, bins and pallets across factory floors in Bengaluru, Detroit and Monterrey, and in the year it persuaded two international venture funds to co-lead a $20 million round, its own revenue for the previous full year had barely crossed Rs 12 crore. That gap between a modest income statement and confident global backers is the real story here: an eight-year-old company that started out trying to build a self-driving cargo vehicle for airports and highways, watched two of its three founders walk away over exactly that ambition, and only found a fundable business once it narrowed the dream down to something as unglamorous as pulling a trolley of car parts from a warehouse rack to an assembly line.

It is now one of India’s most-funded autonomous-vehicle-adjacent startups, with more than $37 million raised since 2017 and robots running inside plants owned by Hyundai, Forvia, Bosch and Samsung. It is also, by its own regulatory filings, still losing more than it earns. Both things are true at once, and both are why Ati Motors is a useful case study in what it actually takes to commercialise robotics in India.

Quick facts

What they do

Ati Motors makes and sells the Sherpa family of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs): electric, sensor-guided machines that tow trolleys, carry bins, move pallets and lift loads inside factories and warehouses, navigating around forklifts, workers and uneven floors without fixed rails or magnetic tape. It sells these two ways: as a robotics-as-a-service lease, where the customer pays for uptime and the robot stays Ati’s asset, or as an outright purchase. Its customers are manufacturers, not consumers, and the buyer inside those companies is typically a plant operations or logistics head trying to cut the number of workers pushing loaded trolleys by hand across a shop floor. Roughly four in five of its customers, by the company’s own account, sit in the automotive supply chain, alongside a smaller base in electronics, tyres, appliances and aerospace.

The origin

The company was born inside the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, and its founders were an unusual mix for a robotics startup. V Vinay was a CV Raman Award-winning computer science professor at IISc; Saad Nasser was an Intel IRIS award winner who wrote the early navigation algorithm; Saurabh Chandra, an IIT (BHU) mechanical engineer who had already built and sold one company, Neev Information Technologies, to the digital agency Razorfish in 2013, came in to run the business side. Their founding insight was not small. As Forbes India reported when the company first surfaced in 2018, Ati set out to build a level-4 autonomous electric cargo vehicle capable of carrying up to a tonne of freight through “semi-private” spaces such as factory campuses and airport aprons, with roughly $1.1 million in seed money behind a plan to find an anchor customer and an original equipment manufacturer willing to build the vehicle under licence. It was, in effect, an attempt to build a scaled-down self-driving truck years before that category had any commercial template anywhere in the world.

The struggle years

The gap between that founding ambition and a working business took years to close, and it cost the company two of its three founders. Through 2018 and into the early 2020s, Ati kept testing its autonomous cargo vehicle at IISc and chasing the anchor-customer-plus-licensee model it had described to Forbes India, a model that depends on someone else agreeing to manufacture your product at scale before you have proven it works at all. That is a hard way to raise money, and the company’s funding pace showed it: after the roughly $1.1 million seed round, the next material capital did not arrive until a $3.5 million pre-Series A in 2021, led by Blume Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners and MFV Partners, a three-year gap for a hardware company burning cash on prototypes.

Then, in March 2022, the tension inside the founding team broke into the open. Forbes India reported in October 2023, citing an Economic Times report from March 2022, that a “difference of opinion over the future direction of the venture” led Vinay and Nasser to leave the company; Vinay had been Chief Scientific Officer and Nasser the CTO. Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings confirm that neither remains listed as a director. Saurabh Chandra stayed on alone as founder and CEO, with Naveen Arulselvan, an electrical engineering PhD who had been with the company since 2017, continuing as CTO. The company has never detailed the substance of the disagreement publicly beyond what was reported at the time, but the direction it took immediately afterward is unambiguous: away from a general-purpose autonomous vehicle and toward the much narrower, much less glamorous job of moving trolleys and pallets inside a fence.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in Ati’s history sits on either side of that 2022 split. Before it, the company had taken roughly five years and about $4.6 million in cumulative seed and pre-Series A capital to build a three-person-founder story around a moonshot autonomous vehicle, with no Series A and a commercial model that still depended on finding a manufacturing licensee. After it, under a single founder running a narrower Sherpa product line built for factory floors rather than public roads, Ati closed a $10.85 million Series A within sixteen months, in July 2023, led by the Silicon Valley firm True Ventures. By October 2023 it counted about 20 customers, including TVS Motors, Ceat Tyres, Bosch, Hyundai and Forvia, according to Forbes India; by the time it announced its Series B in January 2025, that had grown to 40 manufacturers, 30 percent of them Fortune 500 companies, with hundreds of Sherpa robots deployed and an order book the company said had tripled in the final quarter of 2024 alone. The lesson embedded in those numbers is blunt: the pared-down version of the idea is the one that got funded and got customers, not the ambitious one.

The money behind it

Ati Motors has raised money in five rounds since 2017, and the shape of that capital tracks its shift from a research-flavoured moonshot to a commercial industrial supplier:

• Seed, 2018: about $1.1 million, reported by Forbes India, backing the original autonomous cargo vehicle prototype at IISc.
• Pre-Series A, 2021: $3.5 million led by Blume Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners and MFV Partners.
• Series A, July 2023: $10.85 million led by True Ventures, with Blume Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners and MFV Partners participating.
• Series B, announced 23 January 2025: $20 million co-led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and NGP Capital, with True Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners, Athera Venture Partners and Blume Ventures returning.
• Total raised: over $37 million as of the January 2025 announcement (company-stated, PR Newswire); the data platform Tracxn separately aggregates the same five rounds to a slightly lower $35.5 million, a routine gap that reflects undisclosed line items rather than a real dispute over the round list.

What each backer changed is visible in the sequence rather than in any single cheque. Blume Ventures and Exfinity Venture Partners were the ones willing to fund the company through its leanest years, from the 2021 pre-Series A through the Series B, giving it runway across the founder split. True Ventures’ Series A lead in 2023 brought the first marquee Silicon Valley name and coincided with the company’s move from pilot-stage deployments to a named customer list. Walden Catalyst Ventures and NGP Capital, co-leading the Series B, brought a specific thesis about the business rather than just capital: NGP Capital partner Upal Basu said the company’s combination of “Edge AI, LiDAR, and robotics will help address a critical need in the manufacturing sector,” while Walden Catalyst’s Shankar Chandran pointed to the same AI-plus-robotics combination as positioning Ati “to lead the next wave of industrial automation” — both investors, in other words, backing the AI-and-data framing of the business rather than the hardware alone. No post-money valuation for the Series B has been publicly disclosed by the company or reported by the outlets that covered the round.

How it makes money

Ati Motors earns money two ways, and both routes are aimed at the same buyer: a factory or warehouse operator who wants to cut manual material-handling labour without ripping up the floor to install fixed conveyors or rail-guided vehicles.

• Robotics-as-a-service: customers pay a recurring fee for a Sherpa robot’s uptime; Ati retains ownership of the hardware, which converts a large upfront capital purchase into an operating expense for the customer and, in principle, gives Ati a subscription-style revenue stream, though the company has not disclosed the fee structure or any take rate.
• Outright sale: customers who want to own the asset directly can buy the robot, an option the company confirmed alongside its RaaS model in coverage of its Series B (TechCrunch, January 2025).
• Cost side: Ati builds its own hardware, navigation software and sensor-fusion stack in-house at its Bengaluru facility, while relying on Nvidia’s Jetson platform for on-robot edge computing — an outsourced compute layer rather than a proprietary chip, which keeps capital intensity lower than building silicon from scratch but ties unit costs to Nvidia’s pricing.
• Where the company says the edge sits: in its own words in the Series B announcement, its moat is “one of the largest and most diverse factory datasets for autonomous movement,” accumulated from every mission each deployed robot runs — the sales pitch is a data-and-AI company that happens to ship hardware, not a hardware company that happens to collect data.

The part people tend to get wrong is treating this as a simple robot-selling business. On the company’s own numbers, the more revealing metric is not units sold but mission volume and repeat usage: it told India Tech Report in July 2025 that its fleet was executing on the order of a million autonomous missions a year at roughly 95 percent accuracy, and that usage per deployed robot had grown 27 percent year-on-year — a sign the company is trying to be judged on utilisation and stickiness inside existing accounts, not just on how many new factories it enters.

The numbers

Ati Motors is a private company and does not publish full audited results; the figures below come from its statutory filings as reported by the corporate-intelligence platform TheKredible, via Entrackr’s coverage of the Series B round. Only two consecutive years of both revenue and loss are publicly available through these filings; earlier years are not disclosed in any source this piece could verify, so no earlier figures are given.

• FY24 revenue of Rs 12.42 crore was more than double FY23’s Rs 5.7 crore, a 118 percent increase year-on-year (Entrackr, citing TheKredible, 2025).
• FY24 net loss of Rs 20.3 crore was described in the same filing coverage as having “nearly doubled” from FY23, implying a loss roughly in the Rs 10-11 crore range the prior year, though the exact FY23 loss figure was not separately published and is not repeated here as a fixed number.
• On these filings, Ati Motors was spending roughly Rs 2.60 for every rupee of revenue it booked in FY24, a ratio typical of a hardware-and-services company still in its early commercial-scaling phase rather than a red flag on its own, but one that puts real weight on the Series B capital lasting long enough for revenue to catch up.

Where the money comes from

Two splits matter for Ati Motors: which industries buy its robots, and which geography books the revenue.

• Automotive dominates the customer base: about 80 percent of Ati’s customers sit in the automotive supply chain, spanning original equipment manufacturers such as Hyundai and TVS Motor and component makers such as Forvia, Bosch and Ceat Tyres (TechCrunch, January 2025).
• Non-automotive is the stated growth vector: the company has named pharmaceuticals, chemicals, maritime logistics and injection-moulding as target sectors for diversification beyond automotive (Forbes India, October 2023), though it has not disclosed what share of revenue these currently represent.
• The United States, not India, dominates revenue: despite its Bengaluru manufacturing and R&D base, the company has said US operations account for the larger share of sales, and it opened a Detroit footprint and Mexico operations in 2025 specifically to serve North American automotive plants (TechCrunch, January 2025).
• The surprise in this split is the mismatch between where Ati builds and where it earns: an Indian deeptech company engineering its core stack in Karnataka is, by its own account, selling more of its output into US and Mexican factories than into Indian ones, the reverse of the domestic-market-first path most Indian industrial startups describe.

The risks

• Customer concentration in one cyclical sector: with roughly 80 percent of its customer base in automotive, a slowdown in vehicle production capex — the kind that follows an EV transition stumble, a tariff shock or a demand slump — would hit Ati’s order book disproportionately, since the company has not yet shown comparable scale in the pharmaceuticals, chemicals or maritime segments it has named as diversification targets.
• Losses still outpacing revenue: on its own FY24 filings, Ati lost Rs 20.3 crore against Rs 12.42 crore of revenue, meaning it spent roughly Rs 2.60 for every rupee earned; this is common for an early-commercial hardware company but means the roughly $37 million raised to date has to fund both continued losses and the promised North American expansion before the business is self-sustaining.
• Well-capitalised competition in the same Indian AMR market: rivals such as Addverb Technologies, which has drawn capital and distribution backing from Reliance Industries, and the multinational GreyOrange compete for the same warehouse and factory automation budgets in India, giving Ati less room for pricing power even as it tries to expand internationally (Robotics and Automation News, October 2025).

The takeaway

The transferable lesson in Ati Motors’ history is not about robotics specifically. It is that the version of an idea an outside investor or customer will actually fund is often much smaller than the version its founders first imagine, and that finding that smaller version can cost you co-founders and years, not just pivot-deck slides. Ati spent roughly five years and its first round of capital trying to build a self-driving cargo vehicle for airports and open campuses, a category with no proven buyer anywhere in the world at the time. It only found traction, funding and a real customer list once it cut that ambition down to something almost boring: a robot that pulls a trolley of parts from a rack to a production line inside a single factory, repeatedly, without drama. In April 2026, the company made that narrowing explicit by renaming itself from Ati Motors to Ati Robotics, with founder Saurabh Chandra saying the new name was meant to describe the AI-and-robotics material-orchestration platform it had already become, rather than announce a change in what the business does. The company that survives is rarely the one that keeps the founding vision intact; it is the one willing to let a smaller, fundable version of that vision replace it.

Frequently asked questions

What does Ati Motors make?

Ati Motors makes the Sherpa range of autonomous mobile robots — electric tuggers, pallet movers, bin movers and lifting platforms that move material inside factories and warehouses without fixed rails, sold on a robotics-as-a-service lease or as an outright purchase.

Who founded Ati Motors, and when?

It was founded on 10 February 2017 at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru by Saurabh Chandra, V Vinay and Saad Nasser. Vinay and Nasser left as Chief Scientific Officer and CTO respectively in March 2022, after a disagreement over the company’s direction reported at the time by Economic Times; Chandra continues as founder and CEO.

How much funding has Ati Motors raised, and who are its investors?

It has raised over $37 million across five rounds since 2017, according to the company’s own January 2025 announcement: a roughly $1.1 million seed round, a $3.5 million pre-Series A in 2021, a $10.85 million Series A in July 2023 led by True Ventures, and a $20 million Series B in January 2025 co-led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and NGP Capital. Blume Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners and Athera Venture Partners are among the recurring backers.

Is Ati Motors profitable?

No. Its statutory filings for FY24, as reported via the corporate-intelligence platform TheKredible, show revenue of Rs 12.42 crore against a net loss of Rs 20.3 crore, with revenue roughly doubling year-on-year but losses widening at a similar pace.

Is Ati Motors the same company as Ati Robotics?

Yes. Ati Motors rebranded to Ati Robotics in April 2026 to describe what the company said was its evolution into an AI-led “material orchestration” platform rather than a pure hardware maker; the underlying legal entity and leadership are unchanged.

Sources

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

• Forbes India, “Ati Motors: Giving autonomy on industry floors,” October 2023
• Forbes India, “Sherpa: Wonder wheels of Ati Motors,” July 2018
• Entrackr, “Industrial robotics startup Ati Motors raises $20 Mn in Series B round,” January 2025 (citing TheKredible filings data)
• TechCrunch, “Ati Motors raises $20M as India’s robotics industry grows,” January 2025
• PR Newswire (company release), “Ati Motors Raises $20M Series B for Global Expansion of its AI-Powered Robotics Workforce,” January 2025
• YourStory, “Autonomous industrial robot startup Ati Motors raises Series A funding,” July 2023
• India Tech Report, “Inside Ati Motors’ vision for industrial robots: Indian engineering for global markets,” July 2025
• PR Newswire (company release) / India Tech Report, “Ati Motors Becomes Ati Robotics,” April 2026
• Robotics and Automation News, “28 robotics companies in India building machines for factories, warehouses, and beyond,” October 2025
• Tracxn, Ati Motors company profile, accessed September 2026

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