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00:00 Intro
03:53 Furniture business
12:24 Y Combinator experience
19:59 Future of the furniture business
31:53 The birth of Orangewood Labs
48:53 RoboGPT
59:41 Outro
In 2019 Orangewood Labs had $20,000 in credit card debt, they’d laid off most of their employees, and the founders were evicted from their flat because they couldn’t make rent. Five years later they’re one of the hottest Indian robotics startups in the world. Here’s their story.
Orangewood began with a meeting between Abhinav Das and Aditya Bhatia. Abhinav Das had recently shut down his vehicle startup Evomo, and Aditya Bhatia was working as a furniture designer. He revealed to Abhinav Das that it often took months to complete simple pieces of furniture. Together, they decided to found a startup around this problem, building a DIY CNC machine capable of quickly cutting particle boards into furniture.
Within the first few months of the company, Abhinav Das and Aditya Bhatia onboarded their third co-founder, Akash Bansal, to help scale Orangewood’s operations. By the end of 2017, Orangewood had turned profitable by selling furniture to co-working spaces in Delhi. They dreamed of disrupting India’s entire furniture industry through automation.
This vision enabled them to get into Y Combinator, where their ambitions expanded from India to the world. They bagged $340,000 (₹2.2 crore) in seed capital and returned to India. Using these funds, the Orangewood team built their second robot, Optimus, a paint bot that could reliably paint furniture as fast as a human but at a fraction of the cost.
Just as Orangewood was hitting their stride, the co-working industry started to crash. Payments were being deferred industry-wide and as a furniture vendor, Orangewood was getting squeezed. By early 2019 the company credit card was maxed out at $20,000 (₹14 lakh) and they began laying people off. Suddenly, selling robots like Optimus made a lot more sense than selling furniture, so Orangewood pivoted and became a deeptech robotics company in March of 2019.
Out of money, Abhinav Das and Akash Bansal flew to SF to show off their paint bot and raise emergency capital, but struggled to generate investor interest. Towards the end of their time in the US, Abhinav Das and Akash Bansal had about $200 between them (₹14,000), were living off of bananas and pizza, and were subletting a room in someone’s house because they couldn’t afford their hostel anymore. It wasn’t until they met a patent attorney and angel investor who saw value in the IP Orangewood Labs had built that they were able to secure $50,000 (₹35 lakh). This saved the company.
In January of 2021, they unveiled a robotic arm which could paint, pick and place, and weld. This enabled the startup to raise $1M (₹7.3 crore) in September of 2021 to take their R&D to the next level. In 2022 they followed this up with a $3 million (₹22 crore) round.
Orangewood’s latest innovation is RoboGPT, a tool that allows people to control Orangewood’s robots with voice and text prompts. This tech is still in R&D but it will be a huge UVP if they can refine it.
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