We’re excited to share that Mowito has raised a $3M pre-seed round, led by Version One Ventures, with participation from All In Capital, Unisol, and iSeed, alongside angels Soumith Chintala (Thinking Machines Labs), Adarsh Kulkarni (Foundry Robotics), and Ashish Kulkarni (Coformer AI).
Most factory floor work still can’t be automated. It’s not just that the tasks are complex — legacy robotic systems require rigid, hand-coded programming that takes days to set up and breaks the moment a part or process changes. In the automotive sector alone, that’s a $110B opportunity sitting untouched.
Physical AI that learns on the floor
Mowito is building Physical AI models for robot arms that flip this script. Instead of rigid programming, Mowito’s model learns a task from as little as a single demonstration, runs on standard robot arms with no hardware changes required, and lets operators reconfigure it themselves, right on the floor. The result is near-100% reliability, with the precision that real assembly work demands.
This isn’t a lab demo. Mowito-powered robots are already running production lines at a Fortune 500 automotive company, building a critical component for cars, and at one of the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturers. The company is focused squarely on automotive and electronics manufacturing, two industries where precision and uptime aren’t optional.
Why we invested
This deal fits squarely within our thinking on robotics. We’ve written before that we favor task-specific robots over generalized humanoids: point solutions that do one job better than a human, rather than technology built in search of a problem. Mowito is exactly that — a system purpose-built for the precision and reliability that assembly work demands, already proving itself on real production lines rather than in a lab.
It’s also a sign of where we think the value in robotics is heading. As robot arm hardware becomes increasingly commoditized, with more manufacturers producing standard, interchangeable arms, the differentiation shifts to the software layer that makes those arms useful. Mowito runs on standard arms with no hardware changes required, which means the model itself — not the metal — is the moat.
Mowito’s team spans Bangalore and Detroit. CEO Puru Rastogi previously built autonomous helicopters and studied at Carnegie Mellon. CTO Safar is a graduate of IIT Madras. CBO Aditya is a three-time founder. Together they’ve also assembled what might be the strongest Physical AI advisory bench of any Indian startup, with Soumith Chintala (CTO of Thinking Machines Labs and co-creator of PyTorch) and Lerrel Pinto (Meta SIL, MIT TR35) advising the company.
With this round, Mowito will expand into the US market, building out its team and go-to-market in Detroit to be closer to its automotive customers.
Congratulations to Puru, Safar, Aditya, and the entire Mowito team. We’re thrilled to be your partners on this journey.
