ShareChat Founders' Robot Dog Startup Raises Rs 32 Crore — SkimNews
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- Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Pratap Singh left ShareChat in January 2023 after nearly nine years and founded General Autonomy, a Bengaluru-based robotics startup building factory machines — a deliberate pivot from consumer software to deeptech hardware.
- General Autonomy's PARAM robot dog is nearly entirely India-made (only the NVIDIA processor and specialized actuators are imported), was developed in about seven months, and was shown to PM Narendra Modi at a Startup India event.
- General Autonomy raised Rs 32 crore in a May 2026 seed round led by Elevation Capital and India Quotient at a Rs 280 crore valuation, bringing total funding to ~Rs 57 crore; the founders also put in their own money.
- The company remains pre-revenue by design with a ~19-person team, competing against Addverb, Perceptyne, and Invento Robotics in India's humanoid robotics market projected to reach ~$149 million by 2030.
- PARAM was built on Atom-1, described by the company as India's first walking humanoid robot platform, with the longer-term goal of humanoids that can take on physical factory tasks fixed machines can't automate.
Why it matters: Two proven operators just committed personal capital plus Rs 57 crore in outside funding to a pre-revenue hardware bet in a domestic market projected at only ~$149 million by 2030 — a contrarian wager that India's deeptech gap (no domestic actuator supply chain, imported NVIDIA chips) is worth closing now rather than importing finished robots later.
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