Saurabh Chandra sold a software company, then started over in the hardest business in tech. His Bengaluru startup, Ati Motors, now moves parts for Airbus and Hyundai - one rugged robot at a time.
Walk through almost any large factory and you will find a person pushing a cart. A trolley of parts, a bin of components, a pallet that needs to get from one end of the plant to the other. It happens thousands of times a shift, and almost nobody thinks about it. Saurabh Chandra thought about it a lot. Then he built a company around the idea that a robot could do it better.
That company is Ati Motors, founded in Bengaluru in 2017. Its robots are called Sherpa, and they now move material for some of the biggest manufacturers on earth - Airbus, Hyundai, Samsung, Forvia, Ceat Tyres, TVS Motor. In January 2025 the company raised a $20 million Series B and started planning its move into North America. For a hardware startup out of India, that is a rare kind of momentum.
What makes Chandra interesting is not that he found robotics. It is the road he took to get there.
Chandra trained as a mechanical engineer at IIT (BHU) in Varanasi, graduating in 2001. But his first fifteen years were in software. He was a program manager at Talisma, then at Pi Corporation. In 2005 he co-founded Neev Information Technologies and ran it as CEO until Razorfish acquired it in 2013. He stayed on for three more years leading the Neev delivery center inside a global agency.
By most measures, that is a career you keep riding. A founder-CEO with an exit and a comfortable senior role. Instead, in 2017, he walked back into the one category most software people avoid on purpose: physical machines that have to survive the real world. Robots that break. Robots that get dirty. Robots that cannot be patched with a Friday-night deploy.
That single sentence is the clearest window into how he thinks. Ati Motors is not trying to out-spec a rival robot in a bake-off. Almost every deal it wins replaces a manual process - somebody driving a tugger, somebody pushing a load, somebody walking parts across a plant. The thing to beat is the way it has always been done.
The technical bet behind Ati is borrowed from a more famous industry. Self-driving cars use lidar, high-precision mapping and onboard intelligence to move through an unpredictable world without a human at the wheel. Chandra's team took that playbook indoors - and outdoors, into loading yards and between buildings - and applied it to the humble job of moving stuff.
The Sherpa robots run 3D lidar, real suspensions and tires, and sensor-fusion software that Ati writes itself. They ride on Nvidia's Jetson edge platform. Crucially, they are built for the messy factory, not the demo-clean one: oil spills, cracks in the concrete, gradients, rough outdoor weather. Chandra is blunt that a robot which only works on a perfect floor is not a real product.
The company builds the whole stack in-house - software, hardware, sensor fusion. That is harder and slower than stitching together parts from vendors, but there is logic to it. When your machine has to work inside a customer's plant for years, you do not want the hard problems living in someone else's roadmap.
Ati's deployments cluster heavily in one place: the car industry. Roughly 80 percent of its robots are in the automobile sector, where the material-movement problem is relentless and the floors are unforgiving. It is a smart wedge. Solve for the toughest environment first, and the rest of manufacturing looks easy by comparison.
The business model gives buyers a soft landing, too. Alongside a straight purchase, Ati offers robots-as-a-service - a leasing option that turns a big capital decision into an operating line item. For a plant manager weighing whether to automate, that changes the math. And Ati's fleet-management software is built to run other companies' robots as well, not just its own.
The Series B, an all-equity round, was co-led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and NGP Capital, with True Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners, Athera Venture Partners and Blume Ventures joining. The money is pointed outward. Ati has been building a footprint in the United States - a Rochester Hills, Michigan address puts it in the heart of Detroit's automotive belt - as manufacturers in the US, India and Southeast Asia move to build more at home.
It is a well-timed bet. Reshoring and physical AI are the two currents running through manufacturing right now, and Ati sits at their intersection. Chandra has spoken about a future factory where autonomous machines are simply part of the furniture - not a science-fair humanoid, but workhorses that move loads all day and never file for a break.
There is a quiet bit of poetry in what Ati calls its robots. A Sherpa is the mountain guide who carries the heavy loads through the hardest terrain, dependable and largely uncelebrated. That is exactly the job these machines are built for: pick up the weight, cross the rough ground, do it again tomorrow. The name tells you what the company values - not flash, but reliability under load.
It also fits Chandra himself. He is not a founder who trades in hype. In interviews he keeps returning to unglamorous specifics - floors, gradients, oil, the person who used to push the cart. The vision is big, but the arguments are concrete. That combination is rarer than it sounds, and it may be why an Indian robotics company is being trusted to move parts inside Airbus and Hyundai plants.
Plenty of successful founders coast after an exit. Chandra did the opposite. He took the accumulated credibility of a software career and spent it on a harder, slower, more physical problem - and then stayed with it long enough to make it work. Seven years in, Ati Motors has hundreds of robots in the field, marquee logos on its customer list, fresh capital in the bank and a new continent to grow into.
The status quo, in other words, is losing. One trolley at a time.