India-Founded Origin Comes Out of Stealth With $20 Million to Put Wall-Finishing Robots on Construction Sites

A robotics company built largely by Indian engineers has come out of stealth with $20 million to put autonomous machines on construction sites. Origin, founded in 2025 by Yogesh Ghaturle, Ashish Daga and Tushar Makkar, announced on 15 October 2026 that the money came in a round co-led by Accel and Zacua Ventures. Its first robot, OG-1, finishes interior walls: it applies joint compound, sands and primes.

The round is one of the larger early cheques an India-founded "physical AI" company has raised this year. It is also unusual in where the company is aiming. Origin's first customers are not in India. They are drywall contractors in the United States and Europe, where labour is scarce and expensive. The engineering is being done mainly from Bengaluru.

The round and who is behind it

Unilazer Ventures, Schema Ventures and Z21 also took part, according to Entrackr and DealStreetAsia. So did angel investors connected to Anduril, Skild AI, 1X and Tesla. Origin says the money will go towards growing its robot fleet and running customer pilots in the US and Europe.

The three founders bring software, hardware and AI experience:

• Yogesh Ghaturle (CEO) previously founded Perpule, a retail-technology start-up that Amazon acquired in 2021.
• Ashish Daga leads hardware and is described in company profiles as having about a decade of hands-on robotics hardware experience.
• Tushar Makkar leads autonomy and AI. He most recently ran AI teams at Eightfold AI.

Origin says it has a full-time robotics team of about 45 people in India, drawn from the IITs and other institutions. Its job listings are for roles in Bengaluru, including robot-learning engineers.

What OG-1 does

Interior wall finishing is slow, dusty, repetitive and physically hard. After drywall boards go up, crews tape the joints, apply several coats of compound, sand each coat smooth and then prime the surface before painting. On a large commercial job this can take weeks. It is also one of the trades where contractors in the US say they struggle to hire.

OG-1 is a wheeled robot that takes on the compound, sanding and priming steps. Reports say it can reach heights of up to 14 feet and handle corners, pillars and soffits. Origin says the machine works about three times faster than a human crew. In an interview with Forbes, Ghaturle said the figure is measured over a full shift, including the time spent on setup, tool changes, refilling material and end-of-day maintenance.

That claim has not been independently tested. Coverage also notes that OG-1 is not fully hands-off: a member of the existing crew acts as its operator, guides it and keeps it supplied with materials. That is a realistic model for construction, where sites change daily and no two rooms are the same.

According to the company, its first robots were working on New York job sites within about ten months of its founding. Business Standard reports that Origin aims to have 150 robots deployed by the end of 2027. Pilots are planned with two large US drywall-finishing contractors, and further work is lined up in Germany, Sweden, France and Saudi Arabia.

From one trade to many

Origin calls OG-1 a general-purpose platform, not a single-task machine. The company plans to add taping, drywall installation, drilling and conduit installation over time. If that works, one robot could move from task to task as a building is fitted out, instead of contractors buying a different machine for each trade.

That is the bet behind much of today's "physical AI" investment. Models trained on large amounts of real-world data are expected to let robots generalise across tasks, rather than following a fixed script. Zacua Ventures, which co-led the round, published a report with Hilti Ventures and 94 Ventures that found construction robotics attracted $1.36 billion in venture funding in the first three quarters of 2025.

Why start abroad

Starting in the US and Europe is a commercial choice. Construction wages there are high, crews are hard to find and contractors are under pressure to finish jobs on time. Those conditions make it easier to justify the cost of a robot and an operator, and they let a young company earn revenue while it improves its machines. Origin's planned pilots in Saudi Arabia also point to the Gulf, where large building programmes depend heavily on migrant labour, as a possible next market.

For an India-based engineering team, this approach shortens the path to real-world data. Each hour a robot spends on a live job site produces information about surfaces, dust, lighting and edge cases that cannot be fully simulated in a lab.

Why it matters for India

Origin is a sign of a pattern that is starting to show up in Indian deep tech: hardware and AI products designed and engineered in India, but sold first in markets that will pay for automation today.

India has deep pools of mechanical, electronics and software talent but, until recently, few companies building advanced robots at scale. A team of roughly 45 robotics engineers in Bengaluru, working on autonomy, manipulation and field deployment, adds to the country's skills base in a field it will need later. Indian construction is still labour-intensive, and the economics of automation are different. But as wages rise and large projects—metro lines, airports, data centres, offices—demand faster and more consistent finishing, the know-how being built for Western job sites could eventually come home.

The round also adds to a growing list of Indian physical-AI and robotics companies that are raising money in 2026. Investors are increasingly backing teams that build machines that work outside the lab, not only software.

What to watch

The key questions are practical ones. Can Origin turn pilots into steady, paid deployments? Can it keep its three-times-faster claim on varied, messy job sites? And can it add new trades without making the robot too complex or expensive? The company's own target—150 robots in the field by the end of 2027—gives a clear yardstick to measure it against.

Sources

• https://entrackr.com/news/construction-robotics-startup-origin-raises-20-mn-led-by-accel-zacua-ventures-12680062
• https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/origin-accel-zacua-498325
• https://www.business-standard.com/amp/companies/start-ups/construction-robot-startup-origin-raises-20-mn-to-automate-interior-work-126101501678_1.html
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2026/10/15/this-robot-finishes-drywall-3x-faster-than-humans-now-it-has-20-million-to-learn-more-trades/
• https://theaiinsider.tech/2026/10/15/origin-raises-20m-to-scale-autonomous-construction-robots/
• https://www.accel.com/news/our-investment-in-origin-bringing-physical-ai-to-the-built-world
• https://origin.tech/blog/origin-emerges-from-stealth-with-20-million