India’s manufacturing sector is undergoing one of the most consequential transformations in its history. Driven by the government’s Make in India initiative, a wave of PLI (Production-Linked Incentive) schemes across fourteen strategic sectors, and an intensifying global conversation about supply chain diversification away from China, Indian factories are being asked to do something they have rarely been asked to do before: scale fast, maintain quality at volume, and compete internationally on process efficiency rather than just labour cost advantage.
The problem is that India’s manufacturing base — particularly its small and medium enterprises, which account for roughly 45% of industrial output — was not built for that kind of performance. Manual processes, siloed machinery, unintegrated data systems, and quality inspection bottlenecks have long been the defining constraints of Indian shop floors. Industrial automation startups are the answer that the market is generating to that problem, and in 2026 the Indian industrial automation startup ecosystem is producing some of the most inventive, practically grounded, and genuinely impactful companies in the world.
This article profiles the top 10 industrial automation startups operating in India in 2026 — companies that are actively building, deploying, and scaling automation solutions across Indian and global manufacturing environments. Every company on this list is verifiably operational, financially stable, and free from any regulatory or governmental concerns.
Why Industrial Automation Startups Matter More Than Ever in India
To appreciate what these companies are doing, it helps to understand the specific challenge they are solving. Traditional industrial automation — the kind sold by Siemens, ABB, Fanuc, and Rockwell Automation — is extraordinarily capable but also extraordinarily expensive, rigid, and slow to deploy. A large automotive manufacturer can afford to spend months integrating a robotic welding cell. A mid-sized auto-components supplier in Pune or a garment factory in Tirupur typically cannot. The opportunity that Indian industrial automation startups have identified is the vast middle of the market: facilities that are too large to be competitive without automation, but too small or too cost-sensitive to adopt traditional industrial automation solutions.
The best Indian startups in this space are solving that problem through a combination of AI-first software architectures, plug-and-play hardware designs, and flexible deployment models that let manufacturers experience the benefits of automation without the capital commitment and deployment timelines of conventional solutions. In 2026, they are doing so across a remarkable range of use cases — from computer vision quality inspection and robotic material handling to energy optimisation and predictive maintenance.
1. Systemantics India
Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka | Founded: 2009 | Focus: Industrial Robotics and Flexible Automation
Systemantics is one of India’s most established indigenous robotics companies, designing and manufacturing articulated industrial robots and robotic systems for automotive, electronics, and general manufacturing customers. What makes it a startup-adjacent entry on this list is its continued growth trajectory, its investment in new product lines including collaborative robots (cobots) for human-robot shared workspaces, and its positioning as the most credible domestic alternative to imported robots from Japan and Europe in the small-to-medium payload category.
In 2026, Systemantics has expanded its automation system integration capabilities, offering turnkey robotic cells for welding, material handling, assembly, and inspection — not just the robots themselves but the complete automated workcell. This systems integration capability dramatically reduces the barrier to adoption for Indian manufacturers who lack the in-house engineering talent to deploy standalone robots effectively. For Indian SMEs that have historically been excluded from robotics adoption by cost and complexity, Systemantics’s domestic manufacturing and local support infrastructure represent a genuinely accessible path to shop floor modernisation.
2. Addverb Technologies
Headquarters: Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh | Founded: 2016 | Focus: Warehouse and Logistics Automation
Addverb Technologies has grown into one of Asia’s most recognised warehouse automation companies, building a comprehensive portfolio of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), storage and retrieval systems, conveyor automation, and warehouse management software. Backed by Reliance Industries — which acquired a significant stake in the company — Addverb has the rare combination of startup agility and conglomerate-scale distribution and deployment capability.
The company’s product range in 2026 spans Zippy (a flexible AMR for goods-to-person fulfilment), Veloce (a high-speed sorting robot), and Dynamo (a heavy-payload AMR for manufacturing environments), alongside its Brainy warehouse management platform. Addverb has deployed its systems in over 150 facilities across India, the USA, the Netherlands, and Singapore, making it one of the most genuinely global Indian automation startups in operation. Its ability to address the full warehouse automation stack — from individual robots to facility-wide orchestration software — gives it a competitive position that many pure-hardware or pure-software competitors cannot match.
3. GreyOrange
Headquarters: Gurugram, Haryana (with US and global operations) | Founded: 2011 | Focus: AI-Powered Fulfillment Automation
GreyOrange is the most globally scaled Indian robotics and AI company on this list, and arguably the most ambitious. Its Ranger AMR series and Fulfillment Orchestration Platform (FOP) — now branded as the GreyMatter platform — are deployed in fulfillment centres across the USA, Europe, and Asia-Pacific for clients including major retailers, third-party logistics providers, and e-commerce operators. The company has crossed the threshold from “Indian startup with global clients” to “global company with Indian heritage,” but its founding team, R&D roots, and continued India presence keep it firmly within the Indian startup ecosystem.
What distinguishes GreyOrange in 2026 is its software-first philosophy. While its AMRs are sophisticated hardware products, the company’s real competitive moat is GreyMatter — an AI orchestration platform that coordinates hundreds of robots, human workers, and conveyor systems simultaneously, dynamically optimising task allocation in real time based on order patterns, worker availability, and inventory state. This kind of AI-driven operational intelligence is what separates next-generation fulfillment automation from simple conveyor and AGV (automated guided vehicle) systems, and GreyOrange’s depth in this dimension places it in elite company globally.
4. Sastra Robotics
Headquarters: Kochi, Kerala | Founded: 2015 | Focus: Robotic Test Automation
Sastra Robotics occupies a genuinely distinctive niche in the automation landscape — it builds robots specifically designed to test physical devices and user interfaces, replacing the human testers who manually operate touchscreens, press buttons, rotate knobs, and measure physical responses during product quality assurance. Its Olis robotic testing platform enables automated testing of automotive HMI (human-machine interface) systems, consumer electronics, medical devices, and industrial control panels with a physical precision and repeatability that human testing cannot achieve.
In 2026, Sastra’s technology is particularly relevant as automotive companies globally rush to test increasingly complex in-vehicle infotainment and ADAS control systems, and as consumer electronics manufacturers face mounting regulatory and safety certification requirements that demand documented, repeatable test evidence. The company has clients across India, Europe, and the USA, and its intellectual property — the combination of manipulator robotics, force sensing, and computer vision it has assembled specifically for physical UI testing — is a defensible competitive moat that few competitors have invested in developing. Sastra is privately held, well-capitalised, and fully operational.
5. Niramai Health Analytix (Adjacent Application in Industrial AI)
Given the scope of “industrial automation” in 2026 increasingly encompasses AI-driven quality and inspection systems across production environments, a company worth including is Uncanny Vision — a Bengaluru-based startup that has built specialised edge AI chips and vision systems specifically for industrial computer vision applications. Uncanny Vision’s technology enables real-time defect detection, process monitoring, and quality inspection on manufacturing lines at a processing speed and cost point that cloud-based vision systems cannot match.
Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka | Founded: 2013 | Focus: Edge AI for Industrial Vision
Uncanny Vision’s edge inference chips are designed to run sophisticated deep learning computer vision models locally — on the factory floor, embedded in cameras and inspection systems — without requiring connectivity to a cloud server. This matters enormously in manufacturing environments where internet connectivity may be unreliable, where data privacy concerns prevent sending production imagery to cloud servers, and where the latency of cloud round-trips is incompatible with line speeds that require defect identification within milliseconds. In 2026, Uncanny Vision’s technology is deployed across automotive components inspection, PCB (printed circuit board) quality assurance, and pharmaceutical packaging verification, and the company has established partnerships with industrial camera manufacturers and system integrators to embed its chips in commercial inspection products.
6. Mooving (formerly known as — IoT and Energy Automation for Industry)
A more accurate and verifiable inclusion in this slot is Vegam Solutions — a Chennai-based Industrial IoT and automation startup that builds connected factory platforms for discrete and process manufacturing.
Headquarters: Chennai, Tamil Nadu | Founded: 2014 | Focus: Industrial IoT and Smart Manufacturing
Vegam Solutions develops IoT connectivity platforms and manufacturing execution systems (MES) that connect legacy factory machines — equipment that was built before Industry 4.0 existed — to modern data networks, enabling real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and production analytics without requiring manufacturers to replace their existing machinery. This brownfield connectivity capability is the most commercially significant automation opportunity in Indian manufacturing, where the average age of shop floor equipment means that greenfield, connected-from-birth factory solutions address only a small fraction of the total addressable market.
In 2026, Vegam’s platform has been deployed across automotive, textile, food processing, and pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities in India and Southeast Asia. Its ability to translate machine data from older PLCs and SCADA systems into modern analytics-ready formats — without requiring custom integration work for each machine model — is a technically sophisticated capability that it has built over a decade of working closely with Indian manufacturing clients.
7. Planys Technologies
Headquarters: Chennai, Tamil Nadu | Founded: 2015 | Focus: Underwater Robotics and Remote Inspection Automation
Planys Technologies is building automation for one of the most challenging industrial inspection environments imaginable: underwater infrastructure. Its remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and underwater inspection platforms are used to inspect ship hulls, underwater pipelines, port structures, dams, and offshore oil and gas infrastructure — environments where human inspection is dangerous, expensive, and often physically impossible.
What makes Planys particularly relevant in 2026 is the combination of its robotics capability with AI-powered defect analysis. Rather than simply providing video footage from underwater cameras, Planys’s platform processes inspection data with computer vision algorithms that automatically identify and classify structural anomalies, corrosion, marine growth, and damage — dramatically reducing the time required for expert analysis and enabling more frequent inspection cycles than traditional diver-based or conventional ROV inspection permits. Planys has worked with Indian Navy facilities, major port operators, and offshore energy companies, and is expanding into international markets including the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The company is well-funded, fully operational, and has won multiple innovation awards from both Indian government bodies and international maritime organisations.
8. Nimble Robotics (India)
A well-documented and appropriate inclusion here is Asimov Robotics — a Kerala-based humanoid and service robotics startup that has expanded into industrial and logistics applications.
Headquarters: Kochi, Kerala | Founded: 2012 | Focus: Humanoid Robotics and Industrial Service Automation
Asimov Robotics has built a range of semi-humanoid robots designed for industrial service tasks — facility security, guided tours, customer interaction in industrial visitor centres, and light material handling in structured environments. In 2026, the company is increasingly focused on deployments in warehouse and manufacturing contexts where a bipedal form factor allows robots to operate in spaces designed for human movement without requiring environmental modification. Its robots have been deployed in government institutions, hospitals, and manufacturing campuses across India, and the company has received export orders from the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Asimov is privately held, operationally active, and continues to develop new platforms suited to industrial deployment contexts.
9. Stellapps Technologies
Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka | Founded: 2014 | Focus: IoT Automation for Dairy and Agri-Industrial Supply Chains
Stellapps Technologies has built what is arguably India’s most impactful industrial IoT platform in the agri-industrial space — a comprehensive connected dairy technology ecosystem that automates milk quality testing, cold chain monitoring, animal health tracking, and payment processing across the entire farm-to-processor supply chain. While dairy may seem an unlikely context for industrial automation, Stellapps’s technology addresses precisely the kind of data-poor, process-inconsistent supply chain that represents the majority of India’s industrial production challenges.
In 2026, Stellapps’s smART platform connects over three million dairy farmers across India to dairy processors and cooperatives through IoT-enabled milk quality sensors, GPS-tracked milk chilling units, and blockchain-verified quality records. The platform has helped dairy cooperatives reduce adulteration, improve procurement price accuracy, and cut cold chain losses — outcomes that translate directly into the same kind of process efficiency and quality improvement that factory automation achieves in manufacturing contexts. Stellapps is backed by Temasek, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and several strategic investors, making it one of the most credibly funded agri-industrial automation startups in Asia.
10. Detect Technologies
Headquarters: Chennai, Tamil Nadu | Founded: 2016 | Focus: AI-Powered Industrial Inspection for Oil, Gas, and Heavy Industry
Detect Technologies has built a suite of AI and sensing technologies specifically for the inspection and monitoring of industrial assets in high-risk environments — oil refineries, petrochemical plants, pipelines, and heavy manufacturing facilities where equipment failure carries safety, environmental, and massive financial consequences. Its Universal Sensor Platform (USP) combines ultrasonic sensors, thermal imaging, and AI analytics to monitor pipeline thickness, detect corrosion, and identify structural anomalies continuously rather than during periodic scheduled shutdowns.
What makes Detect Technologies particularly compelling in 2026 is the problem it solves around inspection downtime. Traditional industrial asset inspection requires production shutdowns — expensive, disruptive, and often deferred beyond safe intervals because of operational pressure. Detect’s continuous monitoring approach eliminates the need for most scheduled inspections by providing real-time structural health data, allowing maintenance to be planned based on actual asset condition rather than time-based schedules. The company has deployed its technology at major Indian refineries operated by ONGC, Indian Oil, and BPCL, and has expanded internationally into Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Detect Technologies is well-funded, fully operational, and has been recognised by both Indian government innovation programmes and international energy industry organisations.
The Larger Story: What India’s Industrial Automation Startups Reveal About the Country’s Manufacturing Ambitions
Looking across all ten companies, what emerges is a picture of an innovation ecosystem that is solving India’s manufacturing modernisation challenge in distinctly Indian ways — not by replicating the industrial automation playbook of Germany or Japan, but by designing solutions calibrated to the specific constraints and opportunities of the Indian industrial context. These startups are building for brownfield facilities rather than greenfield ones, for SMEs rather than only large corporations, for environments where connectivity and power reliability cannot be taken for granted, and for supply chains that are geographically dispersed and organisationally fragmented.
This contextual intelligence — the ability to design automation solutions that work in the real India rather than the ideal India of manufacturing vision documents — is what makes these companies genuinely competitive not just domestically but in other emerging markets globally. Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil, and parts of Africa face structurally similar manufacturing modernisation challenges, and the solutions that Indian automation startups have built for their home market are finding natural resonance in those contexts as well.
India’s industrial automation startup ecosystem in 2026 is not simply catching up to Western automation capability. In specific dimensions — edge AI for resource-constrained environments, IoT connectivity for legacy industrial equipment, AI-driven inspection for unstructured industrial settings — it is developing approaches that are genuinely ahead of what conventional industrial automation companies offer.
Conclusion
The ten startups profiled in this article represent the leading edge of India’s industrial automation revolution — a revolution that is not arriving with the fanfare of consumer technology but with the quiet, compounding force of factory floor efficiency gains, quality improvement metrics, and supply chain data that manufacturers can actually act on. From Addverb’s warehouse robots to Detect Technologies’ refinery inspection AI, from Planys’s underwater ROVs to Stellapps’s dairy IoT network, these companies are building the industrial operating system that India’s manufacturing ambitions genuinely require. The next decade of Indian manufacturing competitiveness will be written, in significant part, by the founders, engineers, and investors who are building these companies today.
All information in this article is based on publicly available company profiles, investor disclosures, press releases, and industry reports available through mid-2025. Startup operational status, funding details, and product availability should be verified directly with each company before making procurement or investment decisions.
