India’s first companion robot maker Emotix has raised Rs 18.6 crore in a fresh round from Chiratae Ventures, YourNest, and Technology Venture Fund. It has issued 2,794 CCPS shares to the aforementioned investors, reveals RoC filings sourced from MCA.
Chiratae has infused Rs 9.08 crores followed by YourNest that invested Rs 8.26 crores. Technology Venture Fund invested Rs 1.23 crores.
With this round, the company plans to fuel its research and development efforts for new iterations of companion robots.
Incorporated in January 2015, Emotix is the brainchild of three IIT B alumni Chintan Raikar, Prashant Iyengar and Sneh Vaswani who started working together on college robotics projects.
Currently, Emotix has two products – Miko 1.0 and Miko 2.0
Miko 1.0 has been selling on e-commerce sites as well as in toy shops and electronics shops since October 2017. Priced at Rs 19,000 the robot can be paired with a smartphone via Bluetooth and provide three hours’ worth of conversations or about 1.2 hours of movements on one charge.
Claiming to have sold a million units, the company also fulfilled bulk orders for schools and institutions who used the robot to educate students about robotics and AI.
Introduced in December last year, Miko 2.0 is slightly costlier at Rs 25,000 with a slew of new features like face recognition, mood identification and has the ability to start a conversation with children in addition to the improved battery life, better display, and sound quality as well.
Previously, the Mumbai based startup had raised $2 million in a pre Series A funding round led by Chiratae Ventures and YourNest in April 2018. As per media reports, the proceeds were used to scale up product development and establish a better supply chain for the company before the launch of their latest product Miko 2.
(hat tip: paper.vc)
