The startup funding in India this week has a big deeptech headline: Inner Sky Labs, the company behind the Miko children's companion robots, is closing a ₹300 crore (about $30.9 million) funding round to build foundation models for physical AI, co-founder and CEO Sneh Vaswani told Inc42.
Existing backers YourNest Venture Capital and Keshav R Murugesh are participating alongside undisclosed new global investors. Once completed, the round would take the company's total funding to $100 million, and it featured in Tracxn's weekly India funding data for the week ended October 16.
Startup funding India news: from kids' robots to factory arms
Founded in 2015 by IIT Bombay alumni Sneh Vaswani, Prashant Iyengar and Chintan Raikar, the team spent a decade quietly building its own AI models. As Vaswani put it, this is not fine-tuned on an open source model – it is our own model.
The newly unveiled platform covers perception (Drishti for vision, Shruti for audio, Sparsh for touch), action planning (Kriya, Prana and Karma), and an independent safety layer, Kavach, with more than 20 guardrails. It is hardware-agnostic – designed for industrial arms, humanoids, quadrupeds, cars and CCTV systems – and deployable via cloud APIs, on-premise, or even offline and air-gapped for sovereign-AI use cases.
The fresh capital will fund real-world data collection, computing infrastructure and model training as the company expands beyond consumer robots into enterprises and governments. Vaswani said four to five large deployments are already complete across enterprises and governments, including outside India.
Why it matters for founders
A decade of physical-world data became the moat here: Inner Sky Labs is showing that Indian deeptech can raise $100M-scale rounds when it owns the full stack. Founders building AI for factories, drones or surveillance should watch the sovereign-AI pitch – government and enterprise buyers increasingly want models they can run on their own infrastructure, and that is now a fundable advantage.