GreyOrange to enter China & Japan for warehouse automation play

Warehouse automation venture GreyOrange Robotics Pvt Ltd will soon spread its wings into mainland China and Japan.

GreyOrange, which counts Tiger Global Management and Blume Ventures as investors, recently installed its first package sortation system in Hong Kong, Akash Gupta, CTO and co-founder, said.

The company claims to have 90 per cent market share for package sortation systems in India.

"We are looking to expand in Southeast Asia in a rigorous way. We are looking at India, China and Japan as our major markets in the next one year following which we will explore Middle-East and Europe," Gupta told Techcircle.in.

GreyOrange was founded in 2009 by BITS Pilani alumni Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta (CTO). The duo had earlier built AcYut, an indigenous series of humanoid robots. GreyOrange makes products for materials handling. The company's flagship product is the butler system, a fleet of mobile robots that can manage order fulfillment inside a warehouse. It also provides sortation systems and 'Pick-Put-to-Light' stations.

Its sortation system can deal with 6,000 packets every hour. "We will come up with a new sortation system in January which will have a capacity of 12,000-18,000 packets per hour," said Gupta.

GreyOrange currently employs around 300 staffers including 200 engineers. It plans to increase headcount to 450 in the next ten months.

Gupta and Kohli bootstrapped the venture for around a year before the company went for its first round of external funding.

In September, GreyOrange raised $30 million in a fresh round of funding from existing investors Tiger Global Management and Blume Ventures. Prior to that, it raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from Tiger Global Management and Blume Ventures. The round also saw participation from Alok Rawat, president of FG Wilson FZE; Dileep Nath,co-founder of Kanbay which was acquired by CapGemini and others.