Hyderabad-based physical AI startup Tensrai has raised Rs 3.4 crore in a pre-seed round from India Accelerator, Finvolve, Hyderabad Angels and other angel investors. The startup builds software that lets industrial and commercial robots, vehicles and machines carry out physical tasks on their own.
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Tensrai said the funding will go towards technology development, strengthening its engineering and deployment capabilities, and expanding into domestic and international markets.
What Tensrai is building
Tensrai is developing what it calls a unified, retrofittable autonomy platform. The idea is that one common software and hardware stack can make different kinds of machines autonomous, whether they are robots built for the purpose or equipment that a factory or warehouse already owns.
The platform combines vision-first navigation, AI-based localisation, reasoning powered by vision-language models (VLMs), autonomous mobility and robotic arm manipulation.
It also includes a teach-and-deploy feature based on vision-language-action (VLA) models, which are AI models that take in camera input and instructions and turn them into physical actions.
The startup said the technology is meant to help machines perceive their surroundings, reason through tasks, learn skills and carry out operations with limited human intervention.
By adding autonomy to existing equipment rather than asking customers to buy new robots, Tensrai aims to cut the cost and complexity of adopting robotics. According to Tracxn, the company builds systems for factory and yard environments that fit onto existing industrial vehicles and can handle tough outdoor terrain.
Where it wants to sell
The startup is targeting autonomous material handling and cleaning in factories, warehouses, airports, hospitals, shopping malls and commercial campuses.
It is also working on a general-purpose mobile manipulator, a robot that combines autonomous movement with robotic arms, for tasks across material handling, cleaning, manufacturing and construction.
Tensrai plans to make money in several ways: selling robots, retrofitting autonomy onto customers’ machines, Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) and customised solutions.
Tensrai was founded by Sai Nikhil Rao Gona, Venkata Sai Charan Chalamalasetty, Harshith Uppalapati and Vivek Datta, with Gona serving as its CEO.
It is registered as Tensrai Technologies Private Limited and was incorporated in Hyderabad on 25 March 2022, according to corporate records. Gona, Chalamalasetty and Uppalapati are listed as its directors.
According to Tracxn, the startup had 12 employees as of 30 September 2026. The data platform also lists it among more than 1,650 active companies in the same segment, which includes well-funded global players such as Geekplus, Agile Robots and Flexiv Robotics.
Physical AI refers to AI systems built into robots and machines so they can understand and act in the real world, rather than software that only works on screens.
