Robot wars: Amazon has Kiva, Alibaba has Geek+, and there’s GreyOrange for the rest

The Butler in its natural habitat. From video by GreyOrange.

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Chickpet is one of the oldest bazaars in Bangalore, dating back to the 16th century. The roads are chock-a-block with everything from carts and trucks to a sundry cow. Shoppers throng its bylanes, haggling over silk sarees, kitchen utensils, and gold jewelry. Little had changed from the time I had come here as a cub reporter to write about people who collected the dirt from the jewelry shop lanes and washed it for gold.

nIt was uncharted territory for a startup from India. There was hardly any ecosystem for electronic hardware, and certainly not for robots.n

This time I was here to see something equally eye-popping. A truck had backed up against a wide shopfloor, where packages were being unloaded and carried to a beltway. Scanners automatically read the barcodes and tagged the packages by type, weight, and destination. Further along, metal arms shot out and swept packets off the belt into bins.

All this was manual until recently at this courier company’s warehouse. Now, robotic sorters do the job. Who could have imagined robo workers in a Chickpet bazaar teeming with people?

But the robots have increased the capacity for processing consignments tenfold for the DTDC warehouse, and it’s far more accurate too, the processing manager, Bhupathi Anand, points out to me. Human errors in labeling and routing are costly for a courier company.

nAn alternative to Amazon’s Kiva robotsn

The robots come from Gurgaon-based GreyOrange, a rare hardware success story from India. One of its first big clients was Indian ecommerce leader Flipkart, whose global rival Amazon had acquired the pioneer of warehouse robots, Kiva Systems, for US$775 million in 2012.

The acquisition, which made Kiva an inhouse product of Amazon, left a gap in the industry. GreyOrange filled that gap, providing warehouse automation for other ecommerce and logistics companies – from India’s Flipkart to Ninja Van in Singapore and Loggi in Brazil. Even a country as advanced in robotics as Japan has a niche for GreyOrange, which partners Japanese firm Ground, founded by former Rakuten Logistics CEO Hiratomo Miyata.

The GreyOrange sorter. Photo credit: GreyOrange.

The Indian company’s robots do sorting as well as storage and retrieval. There are linear and parallel sorters as well as robots that find and fetch packages. The last lot are called Butlers – borrowing the word for valets in traditional British households made famous by the super-efficient Jeeves in PG Wodehouse novels.

These robotic Butlers have the artificial intelligence to manage inventories and increase efficiency far better than any human worker. They can adapt to changing inventories and order fulfilment in real time, processing a constant flow of machine learning and other data.

See: 45 hot software product startups from India and their cool ideas

Home Logistics’ Osaka center was the first to employ the GreyOrange Butler in Japan a few months ago, picking it over several other options for warehouse automation. “The GreyOrange Butler is an entirely new robotics concept for warehouse automation unlike automated storage and retrieval systems,” Home Logistics CEO Manabu Matsuura said while announcing the deployment.

The Japanese market is known to be highly demanding in tech specs, so it’s an important new frontier for the Indian robotics company seeking validation abroad.

nA duet of software and hardwaren

GreyOrange co-founder and CTO Akash Gupta explains to me how software engineering is the key to its value proposition for clients, even though it’s known as a hardware company.

“When we started in 2010, we had a very different set of base technologies [compared to Kiva],” says Gupta. Server processing power had advanced by leaps, for instance, and so had wifi communication between the server and its agents. This led to new ways of thinking about warehouse automation, with a master controlling an army of robots.

The Butlers are foot soldiers in this distributed scheme of things, with limited intelligence on a need-to-know basis. “We had to crack a few distribution systems problems to get to this architecture, but now our whole system is very centrally driven,” adds Gupta.

The advantages of such a distributed system are many, such as efficiencies in the use of databases. It’s their central ‘brain’ that distinguishes the Butlers from remote-controlled cars.

What this has also led to is business innovation.

Packets get scanned and weighed in an automated warehouse. Photo credit: GreyOrange.

The GreyOrange system can be deployed in three to six months, says Gupta, compared to 12 to 18 months for a typical automated storage and retrieval system. It can also be adopted at a relatively smaller scale and ramped up as needs arise, instead of installing a huge system that’s underutilized for the first two or three years. “So your capital investment also gets distributed over a certain period of time,” points out Gupta.

Thus, it appeals to a wider range of companies and industries than giants like Amazon that have the resources to start big.

Secondly, its flexibility ties in with the emerging needs of ecommerce warehouses which have to be more and more agile in handling a dynamic supply chain with fluctuating stock keeping units and shifting delivery timelines. That’s where the real-time processing capabilities of Butlers come in, and the payoff is more efficiency and less cost.

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“The GreyOrange sortation system allows us to operate round the clock with a much leaner team,” said Tan Bo Xian, COO and co-founder of Ninja Van, when it invested in the robotics system earlier this year.

Last month, Brazilian last-minute delivery company Loggi doubled the capacity of its Sao Paulo unit with the GreyOrange robots. It wanted a flexible and scalable option because it intends to deploy it for same-day delivery in several hubs of the region, with varying requirements.

nBreaching the Great Walln

What next for GreyOrange? Conquering new markets, including the vast ecommerce and logistics spaces in China, for one.

The Chinese counterpart to GreyOrange is Geek+, whose robots help Alibaba keep up with Amazon. The Chinese ecommerce behemoth is also funding the warehouse robotics startup.

Nevertheless, Akash Gupta believes GreyOrange Butlers can get a foot in the door by pitching their centralized software to manage hundreds of robots in a warehouse for a holistic automation system.

See: How Tujia altered the Airbnb model for China – and why Airbnb hasn’t adapted

Besides, China’s massive manufacturing landscape offers scope for multiple players, especially now as rising wages of factory workers drive a push for automation. “Even 10 percent of that market in China will be huge,” says Gupta.

Breaking new ground is something Gupta and his co-founder Samay Kohli have been doing ever since they began dabbling in humanoids at BITS, Pilani, one of India’s premier engineering colleges. They ended up creating a humanoid that represented India in robotic competitions, winning the gold medal in 2010 in the biggest of them, the Robolympics (now called RoboGames).

nFrom college humanoids to industry robotsnn

GreyOrange co-founders Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta sitting on their Butler warehouse robots. Photo credit: Grey Orange.

The success of the humanoid project, called AcYut which means ‘imperishable’ in Sanskrit, led to requests to conduct robot workshops. This became a small business as the humanoid-makers started taking up automation projects for companies – from a medical device maker in the US to an RFID device maker in South Korea.

One day they realized they were dealing with too many technologies to build a core capability in any one of them. “That triggered the thought in me and Samay that we had to build products for a certain industry,” recalls Gupta.

They had three criteria for choosing the industry: it had to be a space where they could be disruptive, it had to be global, and a hardware-cum-software product had to make sense for that industry. Warehousing and logistics fitted the bill.

It was uncharted territory for a startup from India. Hardware development had only happened in a few industries in the country, like automobiles and ancillaries. There was hardly any ecosystem for electronic hardware, and certainly not for robots.

See: How this pioneer built a SaaS hub in Chennai from scratch without VC money

“Let’s say I needed electronic parts as simple as capacitors and resistors. It was tough to procure them, leave aside components like micro-controls and intelligent chips,” recollects Gupta.

The only way forward was to build most of what they needed themselves. “We spent close to a year to set up a prototyping lab for ourselves,” says Gupta. “Of course, at that point of time, that called for a decent amount of money [from angel investors connected with their alma mater], and a big leap of faith. Post that, we’ve been bumping up our own prototyping and R&D facilities. We also figured out processes of importing electronics and streamlining that in India, but setting up our own prototyping facility was the first step we took to kill this problem.”

When it was time to expand, institutional investors came in with an undisclosed amount in 2014. Homegrown VC Blume Ventures, whose co-founder Sanjay Nath is also from BITS, Pilani, led the funding along with US hedge fund Tiger Global Management. They followed this up with a US$30 million series B round in 2015. Now it was time to play on the world stage.

nNew opportunities and challengesnn

The Butler. Photo credit: GreyOrange.

Every problem also carries a gift, and so it proved for Kohli and Gupta. Doing most of their own hardware and software from an early stage contributed to building the two in tandem. This eventually led to its system of multiple robots working in unison under a master controller, which gives GreyOrange scope to boost the ‘intelligence’ of its robots and automation.

Opportunities are multiplying with the rising scale of ecommerce and logistics coupled with the demand for automation in global markets as well as at home. India rolled out a single taxation system of GST (goods and services tax) at the start of this month. This is an incentive for ecommerce and other industries to opt for central warehousing, instead of having a warehouse in each state, which was useful in the pre-GST era to avoid entry taxes. And large, central warehouses increase the scope for automation, where GreyOrange comes in.

Artificial intelligence is also making rapid advances, creating new possibilities for warehouse robots. Just this week, San Diego-based Brain Corp announced a US$114 million investment from Japanese giant SoftBank. The company is creating artificial intelligence for robots to make sense of their surroundings and navigate their way around people and obstacles.

See: Half the work people do can be automated: McKinsey

For Akash Gupta, as CTO, the challenge is to keep his eye on these developments as well as the speed and agility of R&D and innovation at GreyOrange, even as it scales up and adapts to different markets – from a courier in an old bazaar in Bangalore to a logistics warehouse in Osaka.