Startup Deep Dive : GreyOrange — the warehouse robot maker betting its future on software

GreyOrange has spent fifteen years building the robots that move products around some of the world’s biggest warehouses, and its most recent regulatory filings show its India operating entity made less money last year than the year before: revenue at Grey Orange India Private Limited fell 32.4% to ₹340.4 crore (about $35.5 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in the year ended March 2024, down from ₹503.4 crore in FY23, as per data reviewed by Tracxn and Inc42. Yet the same company, whose GreyMatter software orchestrates fulfilment for Walmart Canada, Nike and H&M, has told its own investors that its real, global revenue runs closer to $100 million a year.

That gap is the whole story. GreyOrange is not really an Indian robotics company that also does business abroad; it is a Georgia-headquartered warehouse-automation business, founded by two Indian engineers, that still keeps a large share of its engineering in Gurugram but reports only a sliver of its actual business to India’s registrar of companies. Understanding GreyOrange means following that sliver back through a decade of near-death pivots, one lucky Flipkart introduction and one deliberately self-inflicted revenue collapse that the founders now describe as the moment the company nearly came apart.

Quick facts

What they do

GreyOrange sells the robots and the software that run large fulfilment operations. On the hardware side, its autonomous mobile robots move shelving units and totes to human pickers instead of making workers walk the aisles themselves — the “goods-to-person” model it has offered since its earliest Butler robots and now extends through its Ranger line. On the software side, its GreyMatter platform sits above the robots and decides, in real time, which robot does which job next, and it is explicitly built to be “robot agnostic” — it can orchestrate a mixed fleet that includes robots GreyOrange did not build, through an open API, as described in the company’s own product materials. Its customers are large retailers, brands and third-party logistics operators running e-commerce and omnichannel fulfilment; disclosed clients cited by TechCrunch’s coverage of its 2023 fundraising include Walmart Canada, Nike and H&M, while GreyOrange’s own investor Blume Ventures separately names IKEA, Adidas and Apple among its enterprise customer base. A newer product line, gStore, extends the same orchestration logic into in-store retail inventory management rather than warehouses.

The origin

Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta met as engineering students at BITS Pilani, where they built AcYut, India’s first home-grown humanoid robot, which competed internationally and won medals at Robo Games in San Francisco in 2008 and at ROBOlympics in 2009, per StartupTalky’s account of the company’s history. After graduation, both turned down conventional placements and launched Grey Orange Robotics in February 2011 with about Rs 5 lakh of personal savings, initially running robotics-education workshops. Within months they moved into building white-label robotics products across unrelated industries — medical devices, sonar systems, even automated parking — before concluding, by early 2012, that they were spread too thin. The insight that gave the company its permanent direction came from warehouse floors: pickers were reportedly spending 60-70% of their shift simply walking between shelves and a packing station, a productivity gap the founders believed autonomous “goods-to-person” robots could close directly, redirecting their general-purpose robotics skills at one specific, unglamorous bottleneck in e-commerce logistics.

The struggle years

The pivot into warehouse robotics did not immediately make GreyOrange durable. Attempts through the mid-2010s to expand directly into Japan, Europe and Chile ran into manufacturing-quality problems that the young company could not fully control from India, per StartupTalky’s reporting, and the international push was eventually narrowed to focus on the far larger US retail and e-commerce market instead — a redirection that cost the company roughly two years of Akash Gupta’s time commuting between India and the United States.

A more severe crisis followed in 2019, and it was self-inflicted. GreyOrange deliberately abandoned its existing model of one-time software licence sales in favour of a subscription model, even though the old model was still generating revenue. As Akash Gupta later described it in commentary published by investor Blume Ventures, “you are doing well, and then suddenly, you are going into the valley of death” — the switch meant that “nothing comes from those regions and business models that gave us revenue in the first five years,” and the company effectively tore apart and rebuilt its commercial model around a combined software-and-robotics platform rather than either alone.

The most recent setback shows up in the numbers rather than in an interview. At the India entity level, revenue fell 32.4% to ₹340.4 crore in FY24 from ₹503.4 crore in FY23, and profit after tax fell 64% over the same year, according to Inc42’s review of the company’s regulatory filings — a reminder that even a business that survived its early pivots can still have a bad fiscal year. Employee reviews compiled by Glassdoor also describe a 2023 restructuring in which roughly 150 people were let go, followed by what several reviewers called a pattern of quieter, repeated headcount cuts through 2023 and 2024.

The turning point

The event that turned GreyOrange from a struggling white-label robotics shop into a warehouse-automation company came through a college connection rather than a strategy document. Around 2012-13, a senior from BITS Pilani introduced the founders to Flipkart, then racing to build warehouse capacity ahead of its Big Billion Days sale events during India’s early e-commerce boom. As Akash Gupta recounted to StartupTalky, that relationship let GreyOrange scale “from 4 to 40+ systems” installed across customers including Delhivery and Jabong by around 2015-16, a period in which the company reported roughly 300% year-on-year growth. The numbers on either side of that stretch are stark: a company that had spent its first year jumping between medical devices and sonar systems with no repeatable product went, within about three years of meeting Flipkart, to more than forty live industrial deployments and enough momentum to start planning an international expansion.

The money behind it

GreyOrange has raised more than $437 million across at least eight rounds since its first angel round in January 2013, according to Inc42’s and Tracxn’s review of its funding history. Blume Ventures has backed the company from that first angel round onward, investing roughly ₹1 crore in 2012-13 when robotics and warehouse automation were still seen as largely uninvestable categories in India, per StartupTalky. Tiger Global joined at the Series A stage in 2014 after sending its own technical teams to evaluate the robotics before committing. The company’s first large institutional round came in September 2018, a $140 million Series C led by Mithril Capital Management with participation from Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and Blume Ventures, per Entrackr’s reporting; Bansal later joined GreyOrange’s board. A further $110 million came in May 2022, again led by Mithril, with separate financing from funds managed by BlackRock, per Entrackr. The most recent round, a $135 million Series D, closed in December 2023 led by Anthelion Capital (formerly Cowen Sustainable Investments) with returning backers Mithril, Blume and 3State Ventures, according to TechCrunch and GreyOrange’s own press release.

Valuation is where the record gets genuinely contested. Data tracker Tracxn puts GreyOrange’s valuation at $500 million in April 2021, falling to $394 million by December 2023 despite two further funding rounds in between — a discrepancy neither GreyOrange nor its investors have publicly explained. That is a very different number from the $1.5-1.7 billion price tag bankers reportedly discussed with the company in 2021, when GreyOrange was said to be evaluating a US listing that could raise $500-600 million, according to SiliconIndia’s and BW Disrupt’s coverage at the time. That listing was never completed, and no valuation anywhere near $1.5 billion has been independently confirmed since.

How it makes money

GreyOrange earns money in three layers: selling and deploying the physical robots and racking systems that make up a warehouse automation project; licensing or subscribing customers to GreyMatter, the orchestration software that runs on top of any robot fleet; and, more recently, a robot-as-a-service model that spreads hardware costs over a contract term instead of a single upfront sale, alongside gStore, a retail-inventory product that Blume Ventures’ 2024 commentary estimates at roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue. Costs sit mostly in manufacturing (the company has run facilities in India, China and the United States), R&D for the AI and machine-learning layers of GreyMatter, and on-site deployment and integration engineering for each customer’s specific warehouse.

The part outsiders tend to get wrong is treating GreyOrange as primarily a robot manufacturer, which is exactly the business it deliberately walked away from during its 2019 “valley of death” pivot. Robots themselves are a capital-intensive, comparatively thin-margin business shared with contract manufacturers used across the industry; the margin GreyOrange is chasing sits in the software and subscription layer above the hardware, which is precisely why the company rebuilt its commercial model around GreyMatter subscriptions and, later, an open API that lets it earn from orchestrating other vendors’ robots rather than only its own.

The numbers

Public, filing-based financial disclosure for GreyOrange is limited to its India operating entity, and only two fiscal years of that data are available in the sources reviewed for this piece; both come from Inc42’s and Tracxn’s review of the company’s regulatory filings.

Those India-entity numbers are not the whole company. GreyOrange’s global business — spanning its US, Singapore and other overseas operations alongside India — is not separately audited-and-published in the sources reviewed here, but investor Blume Ventures’ 2024 commentary put GreyOrange’s overall annual revenue at approximately $100 million, with more than 650 employees across the US and India and roughly 15,000 robots deployed worldwide by that point. That figure should be read as an investor’s account rather than an audited number, but the scale gap it implies against the ₹340.4 crore India-entity filing is large enough that it changes how the FY24 revenue decline should be read: it is a decline in what one regulated Indian subsidiary reported, not necessarily a decline in GreyOrange’s global business.

Where the money comes from

Geographically, the business GreyOrange talks about publicly is overwhelmingly a US and international one, not an Indian one. The company opened a US headquarters in the Atlanta area in 2018 — later consolidated in Roswell, Georgia, per TechCrunch’s 2023 reporting — alongside a Boston R&D office and US manufacturing capacity, and its most frequently cited customers in recent coverage (Walmart Canada, Nike, H&M) are all outside India. By product line, the surprise is less about geography and more about mix: a company still widely described in headlines as a “robotics company” now points investors toward its software and subscription lines — GreyMatter orchestration and the newer gStore retail product, the latter estimated at roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue per Blume Ventures — as the parts of the business it wants judged on, even though large one-time hardware deployments still likely account for a meaningful share of any single year’s revenue recognition.

The risks

Three risks stand out. First, revenue is lumpy because warehouse-automation buying is lumpy: a retailer typically signs one large deployment contract every several years rather than paying a steady subscription from day one, which is a plausible mechanism behind the 32.4% India-entity revenue drop between FY23 and FY24 reported by Inc42 — a big prior-year project rolling off can outweigh steady growth elsewhere. Second, GreyOrange competes for the same warehouse-automation budgets as Locus Robotics, which has built a strong position in North American piece-picking, as well as Geek+, Exotec and Amazon’s in-house robotics division, which does not sell externally but still sets the pace of R&D spending that every other vendor in the category has to match. Third, the company’s own history of repeated layoffs — roughly 150 people in a 2023 restructuring, followed by further quieter cuts described in Glassdoor reviews through 2024 — alongside a leadership transition from founder-CEO Samay Kohli to co-founder Akash Gupta in April 2023, and a shelved 2021 plan for a US listing, together leave GreyOrange’s investors without a clearly signposted path to an exit after more than a decade of funding rounds.

The takeaway

GreyOrange’s most consequential decision was not a funding round or even the original pivot into warehouses — it was choosing, in 2019, to deliberately break a working revenue line in order to rebuild around a harder, more durable one. Akash Gupta’s own description of that period as a “valley of death” is telling: the company had a business that worked well enough to keep the lights on, and chose short-term pain anyway because a one-time hardware and licence-sale model would always be capped by how many robots a customer wanted to buy once, while a software-orchestration layer could keep earning long after the original robots were installed. The lesson that travels beyond warehouse robotics is that a company built around a physical product often has to actively dismantle its own most comfortable revenue stream to reach the software layer sitting on top of it — waiting for that revenue stream to fail on its own is usually too late.

Frequently asked questions

What does GreyOrange actually sell?

Autonomous mobile robots for warehouses under its Butler and Ranger lines, plus GreyMatter, a fulfilment-orchestration software platform that can run a mixed fleet of robots from different vendors, and gStore, a newer retail inventory-management product.

Why did GreyOrange move from selling robots to selling software?

Because a one-time robot or software-licence sale is capped by how many units a customer buys once, while a subscription-based orchestration platform can keep earning after the initial hardware is installed. The company deliberately made this switch in 2019, a period co-founder Akash Gupta has described as a “valley of death” because it briefly cut off revenue from the business lines that had funded the company’s first five years, per commentary published by investor Blume Ventures.

Is GreyOrange profitable, and what is it worth?

Its India operating entity reported a profit after tax of ₹10.8 crore on ₹340.4 crore of revenue in FY24 (year ended March 2024), though both figures fell from FY23, per Inc42’s review of its filings. Its global profitability is not separately disclosed. On valuation, data tracker Tracxn reported $394 million as of December 2023, down from $500 million in April 2021 by the same tracker, while bankers floated $1.5-1.7 billion for an unrealised 2021 US listing plan — figures that genuinely conflict and have not been reconciled by the company.

Who runs GreyOrange today?

Akash Gupta has been CEO since April 2023, after co-founder Samay Kohli moved from the CEO role to the company’s board, according to GreyOrange’s own announcement. Board members also include Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, an early Series C investor.

Did GreyOrange ever go public?

No. It explored a US listing in 2021, reportedly targeting a $500-600 million raise with bankers including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley involved in early discussions, per SiliconIndia’s reporting, but the plan was never completed and GreyOrange remains a privately held company.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “GreyOrange Financials 2026 – Revenue, P&L & Cash Flow” — 2026
• Inc42, “GreyOrange Funding 2026 – Total Funding, Rounds & Investors” — 2026
• Tracxn, “GreyOrange – Company Profile, Team, Funding & Competitors” — 2026
• StartupTalky, “GreyOrange Success Story – The Rise Of Indian Robotics” — 2024
• Blume Ventures, “BITS and Atoms: GreyOrange’s Quest to Build India’s First $1 Billion ARR Deep-Tech Company” — 2024
• TechCrunch, “Fulfillment is still hot, as GreyOrange raises $135M” — 20 December 2023
• Entrackr, “Tiger Global-backed GreyOrange raises $110 Mn round” — May 2022
• GreyOrange press release, “AI-Driven Warehouse and Retail Automation Leader GreyOrange Closes on $135M Growth Financing” — 20 December 2023
• GreyOrange press release, “GreyOrange Co-founder Akash Gupta Announced as New CEO” — 12 April 2023
• GreyOrange press release, “GreyOrange Recognized as a Representative Provider in Gartner Innovation Insight: Multiagent Orchestration Platforms” — October 2025
• SiliconIndia / BW Disrupt, “Indian Robotics Company GreyOrange plans $600 Million US IPO” — 2021
• Glassdoor, “GreyOrange ‘layoff’ Reviews” — accessed September 2026
• Forbes India, “Samay Kohli & Akash Gupta: The masters of robotics” — 30 Under 30 profile

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