ShareChat founders secure $3 million in funding for industrial robotics startup

ShareChat founders Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Pratap Singh have raised $3 million in seed funding for a new startup in the industrial robotics space in a round led by India Quotient and Elevation Capital.

The new company, General Autonomy will build artificial intelligence-driven machines to automate parts of labour workflows in factories, as per a post by Ahsan on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday afternoon.

The former chief operating officer (COO) of ShareChat said the mission of General Autonomy is to “revolutionise the future of factories”.


“Factories are complex puzzles, and automation is the key to seeing the full picture, leading to safer, efficient, and standardised production… With a vision to make mass manufacturing agile and distributed like software development, we're in Bengaluru but working globally,” Ahsan wrote.


Angel investors such as Zetwerk cofounder Srinath Ramakkrushnan, Livspace cofounder Ramakant Sharma, and ShareChat founder Ankush Sachdeva also participated in the seed funding round.

In January, Ahsan and Singh, who was chief technology officer at ShareChat, had stepped down from their active roles at the vernacular social media platform.

The moves had come at a time when Bengaluru-based ShareChat was scaling down parts of its business. It has also laid off around 20% of its staff, or 500 people.

In recent other notable deals in the industrial robotics space, Ati Motors, maker of autonomous industrial robots, had raised $10.85 million in July, in a round led by True Ventures.