Four Engineers Were Setting Up Warehouses for Their Employer. They Kept Noticing the Same Problem. One Day They Quit and Solved It.
In 2016, a group of engineers at Asian Paints — one of India's most respected and operationally sophisticated consumer companies — were doing what senior engineers at large manufacturers often do: setting up warehouses. Designing the layouts. Specifying the automation. Deploying the systems. And every time they tried to source the technology required to build a genuinely automated, intelligent warehouse, they ran into the same wall.
The solutions available were either expensive global imports that were not designed for Indian conditions, Indian prices, or Indian operating environments — or they were manual, labour-intensive systems whose inefficiency was baked in by design. There was no Indian robotics company building the automation infrastructure that Indian warehousing needed. There was no Indian equivalent of the global logistics automation giants. The market gap was visible from inside every warehouse project the team touched.
In June 2016, Sangeet Kumar, Prateek Jain, Satish Shukla, Bir Singh, Amit Kumar, and Neeraj Sharma left Asian Paints and started Addverb Technologies in Delhi NCR, with a turnover of ₹1.6 crore in their first year and a founding conviction that India could and should be building world-class intralogistics robotics.
Nine years later, Addverb has grown from ₹1.6 crore to ₹400-plus crore in revenue. Reliance Retail Ventures Limited owns approximately 55 per cent of the company after investing $132 million in 2022. The client list includes Maersk, DHL, PepsiCo, Mondial Relay, Hindustan Unilever, Coca-Cola, Asian Paints — the company they left to build this — Reliance, and dozens of Fortune 500 enterprises. The geographic footprint covers more than 25 countries across India, the United States, Southeast Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. And in 2025, Addverb unveiled Elixis — India's first AI-powered humanoid robot — followed by Elixis-W, a wheeled humanoid variant unveiled at the AI Impact Summit 2026 at Bharat Mandapam.
What Addverb Actually Built — the Full Product Stack
Addverb describes itself as a single source for both fixed and flexible automation solutions — a company that can design, manufacture, deploy, and maintain the full range of automation technologies that a modern warehouse or factory requires, without a customer having to integrate products from multiple incompatible vendors.
The hardware portfolio spans the main categories of warehouse automation. Mobile robots — autonomous ground vehicles that move goods around a warehouse floor without fixed infrastructure — form the foundation. The Veloce series covers pallet-moving robots for heavy logistics applications. The Zip series handles sortation — the high-speed routing of parcels and packages that defines performance in e-commerce fulfilment centres. The Dynamo and StackonX robots work in collaborative storage environments.
Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems — ASRS — handle the storage dimension of the automation problem. Addverb's crane-based, shuttle-based, and mini-load systems allow warehouses to store far more SKUs per square metre than conventional racking, with retrieval times measured in seconds rather than minutes. These are the systems that allow a fulfilment centre to hold millions of items and surface any one of them on demand.
The Trakr quadruped robot, launched in 2024 and updated to Trakr 2.0 in 2025, handles the mobility and inspection applications that wheeled robots cannot access — staircases, rough terrain, inspection of areas where wheeled systems cannot operate reliably.
Elixis, India's first AI-powered humanoid robot, represents the frontier of what Addverb is reaching toward. Designed for logistics, warehousing, healthcare, and retail through AI-driven cognitive processing of visual, auditory, and tactile data, it is simultaneously a product and a proof of concept: evidence that an Indian company, founded less than a decade ago, is operating at the frontier of global robotics development rather than trailing behind it.
The software layer that ties all of this hardware together is Addverb's warehouse management system, warehouse execution system, and fleet management platform — all developed in-house. The deliberate decision to build proprietary software rather than license third-party WMS solutions gives Addverb two advantages: the ability to optimise the software-hardware integration in ways that mixed-vendor deployments cannot achieve, and the ability to update and improve the entire stack without dependency on external vendors.
The Reliance Bet — and What It Meant
The $132 million Reliance Retail investment in 2022 — which gave Reliance approximately 55 per cent of Addverb — was, at the time, one of the largest investments ever made in India's robotics sector. It was also a strategic investment rather than a purely financial one.
Reliance Retail is India's largest retailer by revenue, with millions of square feet of warehouse and fulfilment infrastructure across the country. Addverb's automation technology sits directly inside that infrastructure. The strategic alignment between India's largest retailer and India's leading intralogistics robotics company is not accidental. It gives Addverb a tier-1 reference customer with genuine scale deployment experience, and it gives Reliance an automation partner with aligned incentives — a company that succeeds by making Reliance's logistics more efficient, not by selling them more hardware than they need.
The investment also funded the physical infrastructure that industrial-scale robotics manufacturing requires. BOT Verse, Addverb's manufacturing facility in Noida, represents a ₹200 crore investment in production capacity that positions the company as a genuine manufacturer — not an assembler of imported components with Indian labels, but an Indian robotics company building robots in India for global deployment.
The industrial 5G robotic applications that Addverb has deployed at Jamnagar — the world's largest refinery plant — are perhaps the most vivid demonstration of what that investment has produced. A Made-in-India robotics system, operating in one of the most demanding industrial environments on earth, at the scale of one of the world's largest manufacturing sites.
The Global Expansion — How 25 Countries Happened
Addverb's international expansion did not follow the standard playbook of establishing a beachhead in one foreign market and expanding methodically from there. It followed the customer relationships.
Global logistics companies — Maersk, DHL — operate across dozens of countries simultaneously. When Addverb built credibility with those clients through deployments in India, the natural next step was deployments in their facilities elsewhere. The geographic footprint expanded as the client relationships expanded, with Addverb establishing subsidiaries in the United States, Singapore, Australia, and the Netherlands as anchor entities for their respective regional markets.
Overseas markets now account for approximately half of Addverb's revenue — a proportion that reflects both the scale of the international expansion and the maturity of the global intralogistics automation market relative to India's. European and North American warehouses have been automating for longer, have higher labour costs that make the ROI case for automation stronger, and have procurement processes that are more familiar with evaluating robotics systems. Addverb's ability to compete in those markets — and to win business against global incumbent competitors — is the most meaningful validation of its technology quality.
The North American partnership with Imperial Trading, announced in July 2025, and the Infineon safety partnership for robotic fleets, announced in May 2025, are the most recent examples of the commercial and technical relationships that the international expansion has generated. The Siemens Xcelerator collaboration, reinventing factory automation development, adds enterprise software depth to a hardware story.
What Comes Next — $100 Million and the IPO Horizon
Addverb is currently seeking to raise more than $100 million in fresh capital — its first major capital raise since the 2022 Reliance investment. The funds are earmarked for humanoid and quadruped robot development, AI systems, data collection capabilities, and proprietary technologies that reduce dependence on imported components.
CEO Sangeet Kumar has been specific about the ambition. The company aims to rank among the world's top 10 robotics firms within the next five years and among the top five within the following decade. Currently, Addverb estimates its position at just outside the global top 30 by revenue-based market share. The distance between its current position and its target represents the scale of the ambition — and the scale of the challenge.
The revenue trajectory that underpins the ambition is real. Addverb expects revenue to reach ₹1,300 crore in the current financial year, supported by an order book valued at approximately $200 million. The IPO that Sangeet Kumar has described as a long-term objective — contingent on reaching ₹4,000 to ₹5,000 crore in annual revenue — would be, if it materialises, one of the most significant technology IPOs in Indian industrial history.
The company that four Asian Paints engineers started in 2016 with ₹1.6 crore in a Noida office, noticing a gap in the warehouse automation market that nobody in India was filling, has become the company that is now asking whether it can be in the global top 10.
From ₹1.6 crore to ₹1,300 crore. From a Noida startup to 25 countries. From observing a gap to building the robots that close it.
The answer to whether they can reach the global top 10 is not yet written. The evidence that they are serious about asking the question is.
