Construction remains one of the least automated industries globally, employing over 270 million people worldwide. Currently, only about 15–20 robots are used per 10,000 workers in this sector, compared to over 600 robots used for the same number of employees in the automotive industry.
A significant portion of labor in construction is dedicated to moving cargo such as bricks, cement, and steel, which are transported from the loading point to the required location, floor by floor, primarily manually and using wheelbarrows.
The Bengaluru-based startup is developing robots to handle this task. The company was founded in 2021 by Manesh Jain, its CEO, and Pratik Patel, its COO.
Jain emphasizes that their development goal is to fill the labor shortage, not replace workers. He argues that their robots free up skilled workers to perform more critical tasks rather than substituting them.
This argument has both practical and diplomatic backing. Indian builders face difficulties in finding and retaining workers on sites, and existing staff often spend most of the day moving materials instead of engaging in direct construction.
The company's main product is the Flo Hauler—a battery-powered autonomous robot designed to transport materials on a construction site. It is capable of carrying loads up to 1.5 tons.
Creating robots for construction sites is a complex challenge because, unlike flat, mapped, and predictable warehouses, construction sites feature uneven terrain, weekly layout changes, unpredictable weather, and movement of work between floors as the building rises.
Flo Mobility develops its own hardware and integrates it with artificial intelligence models for fleet management, perception, and navigation. The robots are offered via subscription rather than being sold outright, which lowers the initial investment for a construction company testing the technology.
Managing the robot fleet is a key element of scaling. Demonstrating one robot on one floor differs significantly from a full operational system where multiple robots work simultaneously on a site, adhering to routes relative to each other and human workers.
The company reports having deployed over 60 robots across 25 sites in 10 Indian states. Its clients include major Indian developers such as Larsen & Toubro, Godrej Properties, Embassy Group, Sobha, Capacite Infra, and KEC International. These clients are cautious buyers, as a robot failure on site costs the developer more than the savings it generates; therefore, repeated deployment across multiple projects serves as a better indicator than any single pilot project.
Users of the system have reported cost reductions of approximately 45%, a 50% increase in material transport speed, and a 67% decrease in workplace injuries. This data was provided by the company itself.
In May 2026, Flo Mobility raised $2.5 million in a Pre-Series A round co-led by Mela Ventures and Arali Ventures. ARTPARK, VentureGarage, JITO Incubation & Innovation Foundation, and DevX Ventures also participated. Previously, the company had raised about 6.5 crore rupees, bringing the total amount raised to approximately $3.3 million.
Vidhu George, a partner at Mela Ventures, noted that the construction sector requires products that yield returns within months, not years. The funds raised will be directed towards manufacturing, developing autonomy software, expanding presence in India, and entering international markets, starting with the Middle East.
The company currently has around 25 employees. The Middle East is viewed as a logical first step because construction there is large-scale, the workforce is imported and expensive, and developers are already accustomed to acquiring technology for their projects.
Ropedia, a Singapore-based startup, has raised $30 million in a Pre-A round. These funds are intended to expand its data collection platform for real-world interaction, which is critical for the development of robotics and physical artificial intelligence.
Training AI to interact with the physical world is one of the most complex challenges of our time. Unlike chatbots that learn from internet text content, robots require practical experience. Ropedia addresses this problem by creating a platform that allows robots to master complex tasks such as electronics assembly or tool handling.
The company was founded in late 2025 by Zaoxi Chen, Fangzhou Hong, and Zhiwei Liu. The company's headquarters are located in Singapore and Mountain View, California. The founders leverage their extensive research knowledge gained at Meta, Nanyang Technological University, and in 3D computer vision to solve a key problem in training physical AI.
Traditional methods of training AI based on collecting data from public websites are insufficient for physical AI. Robots need to receive actual sensory data synchronized with human movements, including the interpretation of tactile pressure, camera angles, body position, and timing. Ropedia generates this raw data directly, rather than simply relabeling existing datasets.
The company's solution is 50 times cheaper than a classic teleoperation setup for data collection. Instead of expensive equipment for every experiment, human collectors gather data in ordinary conditions. The company's main dataset is called Xperience-10M, which already contains over 10,000 hours of multimodal recordings and 10 million interaction episodes, providing robotics laboratories with structured logs of real human actions for training.
At the core of Ropedia's data engine is HOMIE—a proprietary head-mounted device that simultaneously captures multimodal streams. Furthermore, HOMIE records video at frame rates, audio, depth maps, hand tracking, gaze direction, body movement, and camera pose. A critically important aspect is that all data streams in HOMIE have precise timestamps, as physical AI models require the system to perceive, feel, and act identically every millisecond. HOMIE eliminates the synchronization problem present in most existing tools.
Due to the lightweight and portable nature of the wearable device, it can be used by anyone on a factory floor, in a kitchen, or in a repair shop. Ropedia has already begun mass production of HOMIE for delivery to technology partners and commercial clients.
The $30 million capital was secured in two Pre-A tranches. In mid-March 2026, the company closed a strategic seed funding round of $8 million and a new round of $22 million. The round was supported by private investors, renowned AI researchers, and partners from the corporate technology and robotics sectors.
The new capital will be directed towards expanding Ropedia's data collection fleets in Southeast Asia and North America. Additionally, the startup will increase the deployment pace of HOMIE to capture a wider range of 'real' behavior. A portion of the funds will also go toward strategic hiring, especially engineers at the Mountain View office. Ropedia's data infrastructure already supports more than a dozen North American companies developing foundational models for autonomous systems, providing robotics developers with the necessary foundation to create smarter and more capable machines.
In India, there is a problem of dependence on imported equipment, whether it is machines in factories, automation in hospitals or warehouses. Such equipment is often expensive to purchase, slow to maintain, and inaccessible to most enterprises.
iHUB Robotics, founded in Ernakulam, Kochi, in 2022, aims to bridge this gap by manufacturing humanoid robots in India from scratch: including the chassis, embedded systems, and artificial intelligence that controls them.
The company's journey took seven years. Three friends from Kerala—Athil Krishna, Akhil K Haridasan, and Sarat S—began researching humanoid robots in 2018, studying mechatronics in Coimbatore when the Indian ecosystem could barely support such work.
Despite this, they presented their ideas to the government, submitting defense proposals in 2019. In 2020, both the Border Security Force (BSF) and the PMO responded, with the BSF requesting a demonstration. However, the COVID-19 pandemic struck before they could create a working prototype, and the demonstration never took place. In 2022, they resumed work and officially launched iHUB, which is an abbreviation for Innovation Hub for Robotics, to turn research into a finished product.
The first product appeared in 2024—Tara Gen-1. This semi-humanoid service robot can speak over 100 languages, recognize faces and gestures, hold meaningful dialogues, and navigate a room autonomously using SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) technology.
It is released in various modifications: Tara Greet, Tara Learn, and Tara Care, which are adapted for the needs of hospitality, healthcare, education, banking, and public services. About 35 such units have already been deployed in three countries. This was followed by a heavier machine—Daksha, a general-purpose industrial humanoid capable of lifting loads up to 25 kg and operating at heights of eight to ten feet.
The foundation for both robots is what iHUB calls physical AI. Instead of the 'text-in to text-out' logic inherent in large language models, their robots operate on Vision-Language-Action models, which link what the machine sees with the language it understands and the movement it can perform.
The company creates its entire technology stack itself: from manufacturing and embedded systems to fine-tuning models and design, using an object in Kochi, Kalamassery. A corridor spanning about 24,000 square feet allows the robots to master tasks through repetition.
This vertical integration is a key advantage, as is the pricing policy, which allows systems to be used starting from approximately $10,000, significantly lower than the cost of imported humanoids. In January 2025, iHUB became the first Indian company selected for NVIDIA's Humanoid Robotics Program.
iHUB primarily sells its products to enterprises in sectors such as hospitality, healthcare, education, banking, manufacturing, and logistics, and also has a separate line for defense and security. The company has signed memorandums of understanding with EY Global and SAP Germany, as well as several Indian IT and industrial firms.
Tara Gen-1 has been exported to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Currently, the company is financed by revenues from early projects and prototypes, rather than large external investments. In March 2025, it raised 4.3 crore rupees in a pre-seed funding round from American angel investors. These funds will go towards building the largest humanoid manufacturing plant in India, according to the company.
Future plans include scaling up production, securing research grants, and establishing an R&D center for industrial humanoids in Bengaluru, with plans to hire over 150 employees within two years. In addition to hardware, the founders intend to establish the iHub Training School to prepare students in robotics and AI.
The broader goal, although difficult to achieve, remains unchanged: India must produce humanoids independently, rather than importing them.
