Zerodha’s Kamath backs drone start-up

Zerodha and True Beacon co-founder Nikhil Kamath, along with Abhijeet Pai, has invested in Omnipresent Robot Tech through their investment arm Gruhas Proptech.

This round also saw co-investments from Kavin Shah, and other individual high networth individual (HNIs), according to a statement released on Thursday.

However, the amount invested by Kamath and Pai has not been disclosed.

Omnipresent, founded by Aakash Sinha, an MIT TR35 Innovator and Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute graduate, has completed 51 km drone flight for HPCL pipelines and it has also been serving most of the major oil companies in India including RIL, IOCL, and BPCL.

Its drones are deployed at several ADB plants, UltraTech Cement plants, and also at Adani Green Energy.

“We are excited about our investment in Omnipresent. With Omnipresent’s propriety technology and a capable founding team, we at Gruhas are confident about the impact of this scheme,” Kamath said.

Omnipresent provided agriculture spray drones to the Centre to fight the locust attacks in 2021. It developed an integrated Agri Nerve Centre solution for monitoring diseases in crops for targeted spraying that could potentially boost crop yield by up to 20 pc.

The company has also worked on the prestigious Chandrayaan-2 project developing perception and navigation software for the Chandrayaan-2 rover.

“We are delighted to partner with Gruhas and confident that we will disrupt the drone sector under the guidance of such eminent partners,” Sinha said.