Interning at Carleton University in Ottawa on a MITACS fellowship, IIT-ians Ayush Ranjan and Vishrant Dave had a brainwave. “Ayush and I came across Canadarm, a 15-m robotic arm on the International Space Station that cost over a billion Canadian dollars to build and deploy. As we studied these hyper-redundant manipulators, we wondered why similar snake-like robots weren’t used on the ground. So we returned to India and, out of naivete, set out to build a snake-like robotic arm,” recalls Dave.
They soon realised how complex the system was. The biggest challenge lay in the control — while a conventional robot may have 5–6 possible solutions for a point in space, a snake-like robot can have over a million, making the compute requirement more demanding. Together with their batchmate from IIT-Kanpur, Prateesh Awasthi, they spent two years figuring out a way to control the arm.
That led them to launch their startup, Armatrix, in 2024, soon after they graduated. The co-founders secured an initial funding of $40,000 from Grad Capital, a Bengaluru-based student fund. They used it to build their first 1.5-m robotic arm prototype.
The Bengaluru-based deep-tech robotics company is developing the snake-like hyper-redundant robotic manipulators to operate in hazardous and confined industrial environments.
The Armatrix arm is 3–5 m long and 50–150 mm in diameter, and with more than 22 degrees of freedom. This means it can thread through tight access points that rigid robotic systems cannot reach.
Since the motors are separate from the arm, the Armatrix robot can operate safely in most environments — including flammable, liquid, or high-temperature zones — unlike conventional intrinsic-actuation robotic arms with attached motors. The arm is guided by an AI-based control that enables real-time path planning in unpredictable environments, combined with digital twin simulation for pre-deployment modelling.
Industrial use
The potential applications include inspection and maintenance of critical industrial infrastructure across sectors: storage and fuel tanks (oil and gas); hulls of ships and planes (shipbuilding and aviation), and nuclear reactors, among others — all of which are confined and hazardous spaces for human personnel.
“All these heavy industries face access challenges in confined, hazardous spaces, where workers spend hours inspecting and performing tasks like welding or coating. Automation lagged in these environments because they require long, highly flexible manipulators spanning 3–4 m. That leaves a robotic arm as the only viable approach,” Dave says.
The company is prioritising the shipbuilding and oil and gas sectors, with distinct business models for each. In oil and gas, it offers a robot-as-a-service (RaaS) model, given the recurring nature of annual inspections.
In contrast, shipbuilding requires year-round usage, making direct sales a more viable approach. The return on investment in the RaaS and inspection-as-a-service (IaaS) models depends on maximising the robotic arm’s usage across multiple sites.
In February, Armatrix raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round. It will use the money to develop its robotic arm technology, expand the engineering and R&D team, and accelerate pilot deployments across industrial customers.
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Published on March 30, 2026