Mithril Capital, Binny Bansal and others infuse $140 Mn into GreyOrange

Warehousing automation and robotics startup GreyOrange has raised $140 million in its Series C funding round led by silicon valley-based Mithril Capital. It also saw participation from Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and existing investor Blume Venture.

Following the deal, Mithril's Capital--Ajay Royan will join GreyOrange board.

The seven years old startup will deploy the latest proceeds towards ramping up manufacturing, supply chain, R&D and expands its portfolio of robotics.

Besides Royan, Peter Thiel is the other co-founder of Mithril who co-founded payments company PayPal (owned by eBay) and Silicon Valley-based big data firm Palantir Technologies.

Launched by Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta, GreyOrange makes robots and AI software to help retailers compete with Amazon, especially on variety and speed of delivery.

The company has two flagship products called Butler and Linear Sorter. While Butler is a storage and retrieval robot that moves on warehouse floors, Sorter is a conveyor belt system fitted with robotic arms and advanced tools like dimensioning and weighing modules.

GreyOrange currently has over 500 employees and it handles warehousing for e-commerce firms such as Flipkart, Jabong, Myntra and PepperFry in India.

The Singapore and Gurugram-based startup has manufacturing units in India, China and the US, with research and development (R&D) units in India and Singapore.

Earlier, it had raked in $30 million in a Series-B round led by Tiger Global with participation from Blume Ventures and picked up Series A round from the same investors in 2014.

Apart from the aforementioned investors, it also counts Flipkart, Mitsubishi and Project Verte as early backers.

The development was reported by CNBC.