Paar Autonomy, a robotics startup, has raised ₹3.5 crore in a pre-seed funding round led by Venture Catalysts, an early-stage investor and integrated incubator.
The funds raised will be used to commission its first manufacturing line, deliver pilot units to defence and PSU customers, and scale its engineering and business development teams. Paar Autonomy’s roadmap also includes direct collaborations with defence establishments, public-sector undertakings and international OEMs, supplying both turnkey gimballed payloads and licensable AI models that can retrofit existing fleets of UAVs (drones), UGVs (rovers) and USVs (unmanned boats).
Founded in 2024 by Vignesh Jayaraman, Paar Autonomy is a robotics startup developing perception hardware and agentic artificial intelligence for unmanned aerial, ground, and sea vehicles deployed in defence, policing, and industrial inspection.
Paar Autonomy builds multi-sensor, gyro-stabilised gimbal cameras that give drones and rovers “super-human” sight, and couples them with proprietary agentic AI models that allow machines to interpret complex environments, coordinate with human operators and collaborate in real time.
Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Co-Founder and MD of Venture Catalysts, said, “A sovereign nation can only be as secure as the intelligence that protects its borders and critical infrastructure. Paar Autonomy is building that intelligence at the edge, fusing multi-sensor perception with decision-making AI so that unmanned assets can navigate, detect and respond faster than any adversary and farther than any human eye. What excites us is the dual-use potential of the technology: the same gimbal that spots a threat at the Line of Control can also inspect a railway bridge or offshore pipeline at one-tenth the cost and without risking a single life. Investing at the pre-seed stage allows Venture Catalysts to guide Paar Autonomy from lab to field, ensure that its IP remains proudly ‘Made in India’, and position the company as a global benchmark for affordable, combat-ready autonomy.”
Vignesh Jayaraman, Founder and CEO of Paar Autonomy, said, “My goal was to push the frontier of what unmanned systems could perceive and do autonomously in the wild. This funding from Venture Catalysts is more than capital; it is a vote of confidence that enables us to commission our first manufacturing line, ship pilot units to defence and PSU customers, and recruit top-tier talent in perception engineering, embedded AI and business development. With the guidance of industry veterans who have already built successful drone platforms, we plan to deliver products that not only serve India’s strategic needs but also compete on the world stage.”
