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Mowito, a startup building foundation models for industrial robot arms, has raised $3 million in a pre-seed round led by Version One Ventures. The round also drew participation from All In Capital, Unisol, iSeed, and a notable lineup of angel investors, including Soumith Chintala of Thinking Machines Lab, Adarsh Kulkarni of Foundry Robotics, Ashish Kulkarni of Coformer.ai, and Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital.
Mowito stated that the capital will be used to accelerate its expansion into the US market, grow its engineering and go-to-market teams, and scale deployments further across automotive and electronics manufacturers globally. Co-founder and CEO Puru Rastogi framed the funding as a bet on solving a shift he sees already underway in manufacturing, arguing that hardware is no longer the constraint holding factories back and that robots should be able to learn the way people do, by watching and repeating.
“Manufacturing has reached a point where hardware is no longer the bottleneck; software is. Factory robots shouldn't need to be reprogrammed every time production changes. We believe robots should learn the same way people do: by observing and repeating. This funding allows us to accelerate that vision, expand globally, and bring Physical AI to more manufacturing environments,” said Puru Rastog.
Founded in 2024, Mowito is developing what's known as ‘physical AI’ models that let industrial robots learn tasks directly from demonstration rather than requiring engineers to hand-code every movement. The pitch is that robots should be able to observe a task once and replicate it with the precision manufacturing demands instead of needing reprogramming every time a production line changes.
The company runs on teams split between Bengaluru and Detroit. It already has robots deployed on live manufacturing lines at a Fortune 500 automotive company and one of the world's largest electronics contract manufacturers, supporting high-precision assembly work across automotive and consumer electronics production.
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Kushal Bhagia, Partner at All In Capital, said manufacturing is entering a phase where AI will fundamentally reshape industrial automation and pointed to robot programming complexity as one of the biggest structural barriers the sector still faces. He cited Mowito's technical depth and early customer validation as reasons the firm backed the round, positioning the startup to help define the physical AI category as it matures.
The funding lands amid a broader wave of investor interest in physical and robotics-focused AI startups, as manufacturers look for ways to automate precision tasks without the lengthy reprogramming cycles traditional industrial robotics has required.
