Vayu
Aerial Solutions: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle delivery of med supplies & vital goods over rough terrain & areas effected by natural disasters.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| - | investor investor investor | €0.0 | round |
| investor | €0.0 | round | |
| investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
$30.0k | Seed | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
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Vayu Robotics is an artificial intelligence and robotics firm focused on developing autonomous solutions for last-mile delivery and other mobility applications. The company was co-founded in 2022 by CEO Anand Gopalan, Mahesh Krishnamurthi, and Nitish Srivastava. The founders leveraged their collective experience from prominent technology companies like Velodyne, Apple, Lyft, and Google to address the high costs and scalability issues that hindered the first wave of delivery robots.
The company's core business revolves around creating a cost-effective and scalable robotics platform. Vayu has developed an on-road delivery robot that operates without the need for expensive lidar sensors, which are common in autonomous vehicles. Instead, it utilizes a proprietary, low-cost passive sensor system called Vayu Sense combined with a transformer-based AI foundation model for mobility, Vayu Drive. This technology enables the robots to navigate autonomously in various conditions, including low light and glare, without pre-mapping the environment. The robots are designed to carry payloads up to 100 lbs at speeds under 20 mph, targeting the e-commerce and retail sectors by offering a low-cost-per-delivery solution.
Vayu's business model appears to involve both direct sales of its robotic vehicles and licensing its core technology stack. The company targets e-commerce platforms and retailers, aiming to reduce their fulfillment costs and carbon footprint. In October 2023, Vayu announced it had raised $12.7 million in a seed funding round led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures. Shortly after, the company secured a significant commercial agreement with a large e-commerce player to deploy 2,500 of its delivery robots. The firm's software is designed to be form-factor-agnostic, with plans to expand into quadrupedal and bipedal robot markets in the future.
Keywords: last-mile delivery, autonomous robots, AI robotics, delivery automation, e-commerce logistics, Vayu Sense, Vayu Drive, robotics platform, low-cost sensors, foundation model for mobility, Anand Gopalan, Khosla Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures, autonomous mobility, sidewalk robots, logistics technology, retail automation, sustainable delivery, machine learning, computer vision