Deeptech robotics startup CynLr raises $10 million in a Series A funding round

Homegrown deeptech robotics startup CynLr (Cybernetics Laboratory) has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round 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.

What does CynLr do?

Founded in 2019 by Gokul N A and Nikhil Ramaswamy, CrynLr specializes in visual object sentience, robotics and cybernetics. The startup aims to simplify automation and optimize manufacturing processes for universal factories.

CynLr’s visual robot platform transforms machines into Sentient robots with human-like visual intelligence, enabling them to comprehend, grasp, and manipulate objects in complex and unpredicted environments.

It is partnering with multinational customers in the US & EU region to co-develop pilot applications.

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.

The startup believes that solving this problem in robotics will be the key to achieving the concept of “Factory-as-a- Product”.

Focused on expanding core team, expanding R&D

With this new round of funding, CynLr will now expand its 60-member core team into a 120-member Global team.

Along with expanding its research & software-dev team, the startup will be hiring business and operational leaders, marketing and sales teams across India, the US and Switzerland. 

Recently, CynLr’s design and research centre in Switzerland (Unlimitrust Campus, Prilly) was opened 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).

Currently, CynLr’s 13,000sq. ft Robotics Lab in Bengaluru is host to a Hive of 25 robot systems which it plans to expand to 50+ systems by 2026.

Purpose of fundraising

With the new round of funding, CynLr will focus on enhancing its hardware reliability, improving User experience by enhancing its SW performance and reducing costs for the customer.

According to Gokul NA, Founder – Design, Product & Brand, the startup 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.

Leadership comments

“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,” said Nikhil Ramaswamy, Founder – GTM, Sales & Investment.

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,” Ramaswamy added.

“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,” said Sridhar Rampalli – Managing Partner, Pavestone Capital.