Going from a social media app to robotics is quite a jump, but it’s one that two former Sharechat co-founders seem to have been quite comfortable making.
Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Pratap Singh spent close to nine years building Sharechat into one of India’s largest homegrown social media platforms. In January 2023, both stepped down from their executive roles at the company — Ahsan as Chief Operating Officer and Singh as Chief Technology Officer — leaving co-founder Ankush Sachdeva to continue running the show as CEO. Ten months later, the duo re-emerged with something almost nobody expected from two software veterans: a robotics startup called General Autonomy.
From apps to actuators
General Autonomy Private Limited was incorporated in May 2023 and is headquartered in Bengaluru. Both Ahsan and Singh are IIT Kanpur alumni, and by their own account, the pivot to hardware was deliberate rather than opportunistic. Announcing the company on X, Ahsan wrote that the mission was to “revolutionise the future of factories,” framing the opportunity around making mass manufacturing as agile and distributed as software development has become. The founders have often pointed to the scale of India’s labour-intensive manufacturing base and the relative absence of home-grown, affordable automation as the gap they’re chasing.
It’s a radical career swerve. Building a consumer social app and building physical robots sit at opposite ends of the startup difficulty spectrum — one is bound by code and iteration speed, the other by supply chains, materials science, actuators and the simple fact that hardware is slow and expensive to get right. Ahsan has acknowledged as much publicly, noting that robotics is a “costly business” and that India, unlike China, doesn’t yet have a mature component supply chain for robotics — which means General Autonomy has had to build far more in-house than a typical software company ever would.
Funding journey
The founders’ backgrounds have meant that it’s been easy for them to raise money — General Autonomy’s investor base boasts of some big names. The company raised roughly ₹25 crore (about $3 million) in its pre-seed round in November 2023, led by India Quotient and Elevation Capital. Angel investors in that round included Srinath Ramakkrushnan (co-founder of Zetwerk), Ramakant Sharma (co-founder of Livspace), and Sachdeva, the Sharechat co-founder Ahsan and Singh left behind.
More than two years on, in early 2026, the company closed a seed round of about ₹32 crore (roughly $3.3 million), again led by existing backers Elevation Capital and India Quotient, with participation from Blue Asva Varenya Fund, FBC Venture Partners, Spearhead Capital, and GIVA co-founder Ishendra Agarwal. Notably, the founders themselves put in fresh capital in this round — about ₹99.6 lakh each — a signal of conviction that isn’t always common among founders raising external money. The round valued General Autonomy at around ₹280 crore (about $29.4 million), up from roughly ₹200 crore in the previous round.
Total funding raised to date sits at a little under $6.5 million across the two rounds — a modest war chest by global humanoid-robotics standards (where American and Chinese rivals routinely raise hundreds of millions of dollars), but not insignificant for a young, pre-revenue Indian hardware startup navigating a market with almost no local supply chain to lean on.
What General Autonomy is actually building
General Autonomy’s ambitions have evolved from purely industrial automation into full-fledged legged robotics. The company is working on two parallel product lines:
Param is a quadruped “robot dog” that the company says is built almost entirely in India, with only the Nvidia processor and a handful of specialised actuators currently imported. Param is positioned for inspection, monitoring and mobility tasks — climbing stairs, navigating uneven terrain, and going into environments where wheeled robots struggle — the kind of use cases quadrupeds from Boston Dynamics and Unitree have popularised globally.
Atom 01 is described by the company as India’s first life-sized, walking humanoid robot. Unveiled roughly two years after the company’s founding, Atom 01 weighs about 31 kg and was reportedly built in around four months at the company’s Bengaluru lab using largely custom-machined components, aluminium and carbon profiles. General Autonomy has been vocal about the machine’s price point, claiming it was built for under ₹20 lakh (roughly $24,000) — a fraction of what comparable humanoid platforms cost internationally. Rather than positioning Atom 01 as a finished, single-purpose product, the company frames it as a developer platform: a relatively affordable base with “deep, whole-body control” that other teams and industries can build applications on top of, similar to how open hardware platforms have historically lowered the barrier to entry in robotics research.
The strategic logic is fairly explicit — rather than compete head-on with the agility and polish of Boston Dynamics or the manufacturing scale of Chinese humanoid makers, General Autonomy is betting that affordability and accessibility will let it seed a developer ecosystem around Indian-made robotics hardware, tackling labour scarcity first in industry and eventually, the founders have suggested, in the home.
Traction and visibility
General Autonomy remains pre-revenue, and Ahsan has been candid that commercialisation is still some way off given how much of the hardware stack has to be built from scratch domestically. But the company has picked up meaningful visibility for a startup of its size and age. It was among just ten deep-tech startups selected by Startup India to showcase its technology at National Startup Day 2026, and it demonstrated its Param quadruped to the Prime Minister. The company also exhibited Param at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, alongside robots from larger, more established players like Addverb.
As of its most recent funding round, General Autonomy had a lean team of around 19 people — reflective of a company still very much in R&D mode rather than scaling operations or manufacturing.
The competitive landscape
India’s industrial and legged-robotics space is young but increasingly crowded. General Autonomy counts companies like Addverb (backed by Reliance), Grey Orange, Perceptyne, Invento Robotics, Muks Robotics and CynLr among its domestic peers, several of which have also shown quadruped or humanoid prototypes over the past couple of years. Globally, of course, the humanoid race is being driven by far better-capitalised players out of the US and China. General Autonomy’s pitch is less about matching that capability curve and more about proving that credible, India-built robotics hardware can be developed at a fraction of the cost — and that two founders who scaled a social platform to unicorn status can now do the much harder work of scaling atoms rather than bits.
Whether that bet pays off will likely take years to play out — hardware timelines rarely move at software speed, and the company itself admits it is still early in building out a domestic supply chain. But for two founders who could easily have taken the well-worn path of angel investing or a second software startup after Sharechat, choosing to spend the next decade building actuators and gearboxes in Bengaluru is, at the very least, a genuinely unusual second act.