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By Sandeep Soni

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Entrepreneur India
L-R: Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta, Co-Founders, Grey Orange

Excerpt of interview with Samay Kohli, 29, CEO & Co-founder, GreyOrange; Akash Gupta, 26, CTO & Co-founder, GreyOrange:

I along with my co-founder Akash Gupta started in 2011 with the passion of building a hardware product company in India. We were looking at different sectors that can be benefitted maximum through robotics.
There have been few innovations using technology around warehousing and logistics in the last many years, which instead of a focusing on product, worked on designing a lot more custom solutions for warehousing
where scaling up was tough. What we changed was that we brought a product approach to warehouse solution. We started with two hardware products or robots called Butler, an automated storage system and Sorter, a packet sortation system that would help faster and efficient storage and packaging of goods at warehouses minimizing labor requirement and chances of mistakes.

One of its Kind

Currently, we are serving multiple warehousing sites of around 10 customers such as Flipkart, DTDC, Delhivery and Mahindra. We have seen spurt in growth in last few months with e-commerce boom. We have installed our solutions at 40 different sites in India in the last two months against eight installations done in previous 18 months. This is a steep growth for us. Moreover in terms of competition in India, there is no company doing the same thing but soon we will see the coming up of some firms. The growth is sustainable for us; we are well funded as we raised our Series B round of $30 million in August 2015, led by hedge fund
Tiger Global.

The year 2016 will be a year for us to expand global. We already had installations in couple of sites in Hong Kong and other parts of China, and we are working with a company in Japan as well. We already have a team in Singapore as we are focusing aggressively on Asia pacific and Japan. We have also started exploring Middle East. Moreover, we are coming up with one new end-toend hardware and software product for warehousing next month that will have much higher sorting capacity and efficiency. We are looking above around $200 million in revenue. Currently, we are close to 320-people strong and are
planning to grow by around five times in terms of revenue and would be around 500-600-people big by 2016 end. In terms of customers, we would be growing three times with investments going into our global expansion, new products' development, team building, etc.

Sandeep Soni

Former Features Editor

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