Hyderabad-based physical AI startup Tensrai has raised ₹3.4 crore in a pre-seed round from India Accelerator, Finvolve, Hyderabad Angels and other angels. The round adds to the steady stream of startup funding in India flowing into robotics and applied AI.
Co-founded by Sai Nikhil Rao Gona, Venkata Sai Charan Chalamalasetty, Harshith Uppalapati and Vivek Datta, Tensrai is developing a unified, retrofittable autonomy platform that enables industrial and commercial robots, vehicles and machines to perform physical tasks autonomously.
The platform combines vision-first navigation, AI-based localisation, vision-language model-powered reasoning, autonomous mobility, robotic arm manipulation and vision-language-action-based teach-and-deploy capabilities. The technology is designed to help machines perceive their surroundings, reason through tasks, learn skills and execute operations with limited human intervention.
Tensrai is targeting applications such as autonomous material handling and cleaning across factories, warehouses, airports, hospitals, shopping malls and commercial campuses. It is also developing a general-purpose mobile manipulator that combines autonomous mobility with robotic arms for material handling, cleaning, manufacturing and construction.
The fresh capital will be used to accelerate technology development, strengthen engineering and deployment capabilities, and support expansion into domestic and international markets. Tensrai plans to generate revenue through robot sales, autonomy retrofitting, Robot-as-a-Service and customised solutions.
Why it matters for founders
Retrofitting is the smart wedge here: instead of asking customers to replace expensive machines, Tensrai sells autonomy as an upgrade. Founders in industrial tech should test whether an add-on business model opens doors faster than a rip-and-replace product, especially with cost-conscious factory and facility buyers.