Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Who’s paying?

Ritukar Vijay: The concessionaire, airport, and end customer. End customers are paying for convenience. They don’t have to pay any tips.

Sramana Mitra: Are you making your revenue from the airport payments or concessionaires?

Ritukar Vijay: All three of them. We are the single point of contact with the consumer where we are getting the order value.

Sramana Mitra: You take a portion of the transaction cost.

Ritukar Vijay: Including transaction fee. We get the delivery fee. The airports are paying us to offer that within that facility. The concessionaires are also going to pay. If we are increasing their sales, a portion of their revenue will be our cut. That’s how we balance it out so that a subscription is viable. If airports are paying everything, they need a very strong ROI on that. It’s a mixed bag.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very long and complex sales cycle.

Ritukar Vijay: One and a half years’ sales cycle, but the repeatability is very high. Once you have the right concessionaires onboard, they are present in 50 to 60 airports. Instead of putting multiple robots without steady concessionaires, we should aim for the concessionaires.

Sramana Mitra: But you haven’t seen that yet.

Ritukar Vijay: Not yet. We just got Rome International Airport. We went live with Duty Free. Even if the concessionaire is not repeating, the familiarity of getting things delivered helps.

Sramana Mitra: How many airports are in some form of pilot with you?

Ritukar Vijay: Around three. Apart from that, a lot of other things started happening from last-mile delivery and curbside delivery.

Sramana Mitra: You have other revenue channels?

Ritukar Vijay: Yes. One of the most important problems was to navigate in crowded environments autonomously. Once we had this, there are larger market opportunities that come into picture like last mile delivery. Also curbside deliveries grew 700% in one and a half years. When you order online and you have a slot for a pickup, you park your car and somebody will get your items and put it in the trunk.

This is a very specific use case. The robots have to transition from indoor to the parking lot. We played on our strength and tied up with some of the largest retailers in the US and did some pilots. Now we are at stage two and three where the store pilots are happening in North America.

Sramana Mitra: These are paid engagements?

Ritukar Vijay: Yes, and are highly scalable engagements. We didn’t put everything in the same basket. We have the core technology and there are multiple application areas. While we were doing that, it was 2021 when we realized that we cannot have different products for everyone. That’s when we created a single product which solves the three use cases.

Sramana Mitra: One of the use cases is the curbside delivery?

Ritukar Vijay: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What is the third one?

Ritukar Vijay: Hyperlocal last-mile delivery. This is where the robots navigate on the sidewalks.

Sramana Mitra: Is your retail customer base mostly in food and beverage?

Ritukar Vijay: One of our advantages is that our robot capacity is good enough. Grocery was our first point, but we do F&B as well.

Sramana Mitra: Grocery retail.

Ritukar Vijay: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Great story! How much money did you raise in August?

Ritukar Vijay: $3.3 million. So far, we have raised $4.9 million. This is a very exciting time. It’s very strange times. Despite the fact that there’s inflation, people are still not taking jobs for delivering things. Staffing is a big problem. There’s high labor cost and inflation, yet there’s no labor availability.

Sramana Mitra: Is it hard to sell tothe US and European customers from India? How are you managing the business development work?

Ritukar Vijay: COVID helped us tremendously because everything happened online. Post that, we have our office in New York where we have our tech team. Our sales is focused on North America. We shuttle between India and the US. Because of the overall geopolitical climate, dependency on one single country is something that everybody is wary of. India has a very unique positioning from that perspective. Manufacturing is picking up. That’s an opportunity.

Sramana Mitra: How many people do you have?

Ritukar Vijay: Around 40 people.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the split?

Ritukar Vijay: Six people in the US and the rest are in India.

Sramana Mitra: Congratulations and all the best. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy
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