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 fresh capital will go towards technology development, strengthening engineering and deployment capabilities, and expansion into domestic and international markets.
Tensrai is building what it calls a unified, retrofittable autonomy platform: one common software and hardware stack that lets industrial and commercial robots, vehicles and machines carry out physical tasks on their own. The platform combines vision-first navigation, AI-based localisation, reasoning powered by vision-language models, autonomous mobility and robotic arm manipulation, along with a teach-and-deploy feature based on vision-language-action models that turn camera input and instructions into physical actions.
Instead of asking customers to buy new robots, Tensrai adds autonomy to equipment that factories and warehouses already own, aiming to cut the cost and complexity of adopting robotics. It is targeting autonomous material handling and cleaning across factories, warehouses, airports, hospitals, shopping malls and commercial campuses, and is also developing a general-purpose mobile manipulator for tasks across material handling, cleaning, manufacturing and construction. It plans to earn through robot sales, autonomy retrofitting, Robot-as-a-Service and customised solutions.
Tensrai was founded by Sai Nikhil Rao Gona, who serves as CEO, along with Venkata Sai Charan Chalamalasetty, Harshith Uppalapati and Vivek Datta. Registered as Tensrai Technologies Private Limited, it was incorporated in Hyderabad in March 2022 and had 12 employees as of September 30, 2026, according to Tracxn.
FundForge Insight: Physical AI is where the AI boom meets the factory floor, and Tensrai's retrofit thesis is the capital-efficient route into it. India's manufacturers will not rip out working machines, but many will pay to make them smarter. The hard part is that Tracxn counts more than 1,650 active companies in this segment, including well-funded global players such as Geekplus, Agile Robots and Flexiv Robotics. In a field this crowded, real deployments, not demos, decide who survives.
Details in this report are drawn from Indian Startup News (October 30, 2026) and Entrackr (October 29, 2026), including figures announced by the company. This article is for information only and is not investment advice.
Cover image: autonomous warehouse robots at an Ocado facility, shown for illustration; the machines pictured are not Tensrai’s. Photo: Techwords via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, converted to black and white.
