CynLr – Indian DeepTech Robotics Company Raises $10M / 74 Cr Series A Funding

• Investment round led by Pavestone and Athera Venture Partners (formerly Inventus India) while existing investors Speciale Invest, Infoedge (Redstart) and others also participated in this round
• Investment to be utilized for team and supply chain network expansion and enhancing hardware and software capabilities that will reduce costs and improve customer experience

 India: Indian DeepTech Robotics Startup, CynLr (Cybernetics Laboratory) has raised $10Million / 74Cr in a fresh round of Series A funding led by Pavestone and Athera Venture Partners (formerly Inventus India), bringing its total funding to $15.2 Million. Existing investors Speciale Invest, Infoedge (Redstart) and others also participated in this round of fundraising. CynLr is building the missing layers of fundamental technology that will enable the robots to intuitively recognize and manipulate even unknown objects of any shape, colour, size and form, just like a human baby might. Solving this four-decade-old problem in robotics will be the key to achieving the concept of “Universal Factories”.

Imagine a factory the size of a small car, capable of producing every kind of product, irrespective of shape, size, or complexity—from an LED television to a car, and even a tiny bottle of shampoo—and this mini factory can be installed on every street and every corner. This is the vision CynLr is working to bring to life with their robots, which have cracked the first step toward making this vision a reality: the ability to observe, understand, and interact with the physical world. This seemingly simple ability—to pick up anything in front of us without a plan or thought—has remained an unsolved problem in robotics for 40 years. CynLr is solving this by drawing inspiration from the very technology we humans are born with: our eyes and brain, which are naturally designed to perceive, touch, feel, and interact with the physical world.

In the past year CynLr has attracted close to 15k job applicants from across the country, ranging from Core Engineering Talent to Research and Software Development.  CynLr will now expand its 60-member core team into a 120-member Global team. It also aims to harness the talent from India’s tier-2 cities—individuals with global mettle and bring them to an international stage. Along with expanding its Research & SW dev team, CynLr will be hiring Marketing, Sales, Business and Operational Leaders across India, US and Switzerland. CynLr’s Design & Research Centre in Switzerland (Unlimitrust Campus, Prilly) was opened recently by Alain Gillièron, Mayor of Prilly during Swiss Indian Innovation Week on 26th September 2024. The Switzerland Centre will work closely with CynLr’s Research partners in EPFL LASA (Lausanne) and CSEM (Neuchâtel).

CynLr sees a great opportunity for India to evolve into a research & design capital in Robotics. To foster an ecosystem for robotics research and development in India,  CynLr has established a 13,000sq. ft Robotics Lab in Bengaluru and hosts 25 Robot Systems which it plans to expand to 50+ systems by 2026.

CyRo the 3-Armed, Modular, General-Purpose, Dexterous Robot System is CynLr’s first product that can intuitively pick any object without training and can be quickly configured for complex handling tasks.

CyRo is powered by CynLr’s proprietary Human-Eye inspired Robotic Vision Stack – CLX-01. Unlike traditional machine learning vision systems which relies only on pre fed data, CLX-01 uses real time motion and convergence of its two lenses to dynamically see depth of unknown Objects. This technology called Event Imaging, developed at CynLr is Highly Agnostic to Lighting Variations, even for Transparent & highly reflective Objects.

“With the CyRo form factor receiving a resounding response from customers, technology-market fit has been firmly established. These customers are now eager to integrate CyRo into their production lines and experiment the transformational vision of a ‘Universal Factory’ that can profitably produce custom-fit consumer goods, even at low volumes.

With the new round of funding, CynLr will focus to enhance its Hardware reliability, improve User experience by enhancing its SW performance and reduce costs for the customer. CynLr manages an extensive supply chain of 400+ parts sourced across 14 countries and will expand its Manufacturing Capacity to achieve the goal of deploying One Robot System per day and reach the $22 Million revenue milestone by 2027. ” says Gokul NA, Founder – Design, Product & Brand, CynLr.

“This round of investments will help us focus on Deeper R&D to build more complex applications and solutions for our customers – like Denso where they need to manage their demand variability for different parts through a hot-swappable robot station to plant-level automation – like with General Motors where they require one standard robot platform to handle 22000+ parts for assembly of the vehicles. With the current momentum of breakthroughs in CyRo’s capabilities, we will be able to substantially reduce costs and drive adoption, bringing it closer to realizing the possibility of creating an ‘Object Store’ – a platform similar to today’s app stores, allowing customers to pick a recipe of applications and Object models to have the Robot instantaneously perform a desired task. The company will simultaneously invest in infrastructure for support, solutions Engineering and sales to support this larger vision.” – Nikhil Ramaswamy, Founder – GTM, Sales & Investment.

“CynLr’s concept of a ‘Universal Factory’ will simplify and eliminate the Minimum Order Quantity bottleneck for manufacturing.  Furthermore, the idea of changing automation by simply downloading task recipe from an online platform, makes factories to be product agnostic that can produce entirely new products out of same factory at a click of a button, is a future that we look forward to ” – Sridhar Rampalli – Managing Partner, Pavestone Capital

“Automating using a state-of-the-art industrial robot today costs 3x the price of a robot in customization, along with 24+ months of design modifications. This is the significant technological bottleneck that the team at CynLr is solving, paving the way for long-overdue evolution in automation. We are excited to be a part of their journey in building the factories of the future” – Vishesh Rajaram – Managing Partner, Speciale Invest

” Enabling an industrial robot to perform seemingly simple tasks (like inserting a screw without slipping, for example), is what CynLr has managed to crack. This breakthrough will enable the manufacturing industry to dramatically increase efficiency, and maximize the value of production setups,” says Samir Kumar – GP,  Athera Venture Partners