Advanced Training Engineer

India already tried this once. July 16, 2026 India's robotics ecosystem is advancing rapidly, but its biggest bottleneck remains the precision manufacturing layer beneath the AI. In 2000, a Bengaluru company built a robotic arm where every joint was independently intelligent and networked. It was a feature that would not become a standard in collaborative robots globally for another decade. Yet, the arm never found its market. This did not happen because someone built something better. It happened because every single component that made it actually work had to come from Japanese and European suppliers, and once you added those costs up, the economics simply did not hold. That story tends to get told as one company's isolated misfortune. In reality, it is much more useful as a structural pattern, one that has repeated itself quietly across every wave of Indian robotics since. When large Indian manufacturers did eventually begin automating at scale, they bypassed domestic options and reached for proven foreign hardware every single time. By the mid-2010s, Maruti Suzuki's plants in Manesar and Gurgaon were running roughly 5,000 imported robots across their lines, sourcing from Fanuc, ABB, Kawasaki, Yaskawa, and KUKA. Around 2011, Bajaj Auto became one of the first in the country to adopt collaborative robots, choosing Universal Robots from Denmark. Royal Enfield's plant near Chennai bought from ABB, while Mahindra's Nashik factory built its welding lines around imported systems. The domestic robotics companies that existed through this period were largely locked out of the boom happening right next to them, simply because buyers prioritized global reliability over domestic experimentation. The underlying constraint that stopped that first wave has not gone away. The precision components that actually determine what a robot can do - servo motors, harmonic drive reducers, encoders, and motion controllers - are still almost entirely imported in India today, primarily from Japanese and European suppliers, with China increasingly undercutting both on the lower end. These are not peripheral parts; they are what makes a joint move precisely, what gives an arm its dexterity, and what lets a mobile robot navigate reliably. To put the scale of this problem in perspective, India's entire national robot installation in 2024 was roughly 9,100 units. China installed 295,000 in the same year. Assembled in India is not the same thing as built in India. That distinction is where the first wave got stuck, and it is the same distinction that matters most in this one. So, the question worth asking about any Indian physical AI company right now is not whether the product is good or whether the team is brilliant. It's how far down "in India" actually goes, and whether that answer holds together when you're building your hundredth unit instead of your first prototype. Fortunately, that question is finally starting to attract interesting answers from an unexpected direction. Sona BLW Precision Forgings, a company that built its reputation making precision gears for the automotive industry, approved a significant capital commitment in June 2026 to manufacture components for the robotics industry. They have also confirmed a strategic partnership with Germany's Neura Robotics to jointly develop robots, humanoids, components, and sub-assemblies for India and other markets. The logic is direct: the high-torque, precision-engineered parts that go into an EV powertrain are the very same parts a robot joint needs. Similarly, Bharat Forge signed an MoU with Munich-based Agile Robots in January 2026 to co-develop AI-driven robotics and intelligent industrial automation solutions, combining Bharat Forge's manufacturing scale with Agile's robotics and software capabilities. Even startups are shifting vertically; Ethereal Machines, which traced its origins to a Bengaluru college dorm in 2010, spent years failing to build a robotic arm because precision CNC machining was not available locally at a reasonable cost. Instead of giving up, they built the CNC machines themselves. Today, they manufacture aerospace components from a massive facility in Bengaluru, backed by Peak XV, Blume, and Avataar, and are actively working toward their own proprietary CNC controller. The government is pushing on this broader component-manufacturing layer too. The Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme (ECMS), aimed at deepening India's domestic electronics component ecosystem, saw its budget nearly doubled to ₹40,000 crore in the 2026-27 union budget. None of this means the constraint is entirely resolved - these are early commitments and MoUs, not components shipping at global volume. The domestic precision manufacturing layer remains thin. Meanwhile, what has genuinely changed is the layer above. GreyOrange, India-founded and now Atlanta-based, has deployed thousands of robotic agents for Walmart, IKEA, and Apple, with early backers at Blume calling it India's proudest deep-tech export and a potential billion-dollar revenue company. Addverb, built in Noida with backing from Reliance, has expanded from warehouse automation into humanoid systems deployed globally. Simultaneously, Mowito is teaching factory robot arms new tasks from a handful of human demonstrations rather than months of custom programming. The software, the AI, the deployment - that part of the tech stack has genuinely caught up. But the precision manufacturing layer below has not. That boring middle of the physical stack is still exactly where the ultimate outcome gets decided. Sathvika G is an Investment Fellow at Capria Ventures. This article was originally published on LinkedIn> Be the first to hear the latest investment updates, AI tech trends, and partner insights from Capria Ventures by subscribing to our monthly newsletter.

NEURA Robotics and Dassault Systèmes announce partnership to scale Physical AI through virtual twins and real world learning. * April 23, 2026 Hannover, Germany, April 23, 2026 - NEURA Robotics (NEURA), the European pioneer in cognitive robotics and Physical AI, and Dassault Systèmes, a global leader in virtual twin technology, today announced a partnership to connect virtual worlds with real world robotics at scale. This marks a major step in positioning European technology as a global benchmark for industrial AI. The collaboration brings together NEURA's Physical AI ecosystem with Dassault Systèmes' 3DEXPERIENCE platform to create a new industrial intelligence loop, robots learn in simulation, perform in reality, and continuously improve across both worlds. The goals: accelerate industrial automation, dramatically increase data generation for robotics AI, and make next generation intelligent robotics scalable for companies worldwide. Closing the Data Gap in Robotics One of the greatest barriers to Physical AI is not hardware, it is data. Unlike digital AI systems trained on vast internet datasets, robots must learn from physical interactions in the real world. The data collected through such training is scarce, expensive, and slow to generate. Through this partnership, every physical NEURA Gym training cell and every deployed customer environment can now begin to be mirrored by an AI powered virtual twin environment on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. This allows customers and developers to generate, validate, and optimize robot skills not only with real world data, but with highly precise synthetic data at scale. The result is a new training paradigm where real and virtual data continuously reinforce each other, unlocking faster learning, greater robustness, and dramatically broader capability sets for robots. From Simulation to Deployment, One Continuous Platform. The partnership enables an end to end workflow across the full robotics lifecycle: * Design and planning: Build virtual twins of factories, workflows, products, and environments * Training and validation: Train robotic skills in NEURA Gyms - physical training environments for robots - and synthetic environments simultaneously * Deployment: Transfer validated skills directly into NEURA robots in the field * Continuous Improvement: Feed operational learnings back into both the virtual and real environments This creates a closed loop system where every deployment makes the entire ecosystem smarter. Aligned with Dassault Systèmes' 3D UNIV+RSES, it brings together virtual twins, real-world robotics, and AI into a unified and scalable innovation environment. David Reger, Founder and CEO of NEURA Robotics, said: "The AI of the future will not live only in data centers or on screens. It will move machines, support workers, strengthen industries, and operate in the real world. To achieve that, robots must learn across both realities, the physical and the virtual. Together with Dassault Systèmes, we are building exactly this bridge. This partnership is about more than technology. It is about creating the next industrial chapter from Europe for the world." Sabine Scheunert, Managing Director Eurocentral, Dassault Systèmes, said: "Addressing real-world use cases and efficiently deploying and training robotics is shaping a new European competitive edge. Driven by the seamless link between AI-powered virtual twins and physical systems, it enables trusted, sovereign innovation across the full lifecycle. Together with NEURA Robotics, we bring this integration into global production plants and redefine how robotics evolves from concepts and requirements into fully intelligent industrial operations." A New Era of Industrial Automation As part of the first phase, NEURA's humanoid robot 4NE1 ("For Anyone") will be integrated into Dassault Systèmes' virtual twin ecosystem, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, with further robot form factors to follow. The long-term vision is to make intelligent robotics accessible, trainable, and deployable for any industry through an open and scalable platform model. About NEURA Robotics NEURA Robotics was founded in 2019 by David Reger with the mission to close key innovation gaps and usher in the era of cognitive robotics. The award-winning innovators from Metzingen follow a consistent "one-device" approach across their entire product portfolio - from industrial to household robots. With the Neuraverse, the company is creating the foundation for the breakthrough moment of robotics, bridging the gap between technology and humans. All core innovations, including AI, are developed in-house. NEURA's cognitive robots can see, hear, and have a sense of touch. They act fully autonomously and learn from experience. Today, NEURA is on the path to bringing the first general-purpose humanoid robot to market, supported by a rapidly growing global partner network. Press contact For further information, images and interview requests, please contact