India's Underwater Robotics Startups Surface: EyeROV & Peers

India's underwater robotics sector is quietly moving from prototype to procurement. Kochi-based EyeROV has secured a Rs 47 crore order from the Indian Navy (September 2025) and followed it with a Rs 13 crore pre-Series A round in February 2026, bringing its total funding past $2 million. It's one signal among several that domestic underwater and maritime autonomy startups are starting to find paying customers — even as they remain far smaller than their American counterparts.

EyeROV: from trust barrier to Navy contract

Founded by Johns T Mathai and Kannappa Palaniappan P, EyeROV builds remotely operated vehicles that replace human divers for underwater inspection. The company says it has completed more than 150 projects for over 80 clients, including Tata Power, NHPC, Adani, ONGC, BPCL, Maersk, the Indian Navy, DRDO, and the Indian Coast Guard. Its robots operate to depths of 450 metres and can inspect tunnels up to 10 kilometres long.

The February 2026 pre-Series A round was co-led by AWE Funds and Unicorn India Ventures. Despite this traction, Mathai has described the core sales challenge plainly: convincing industries to swap out a diver for a robot built by a newer Indian company is, in his words, a hard sale built on trust.

Hyper Horizon: small vehicles, no funding yet

Bengaluru-based Hyper Horizon, founded in 2023 by Vishaal M Kabilan and Sibi M, takes a different approach — building small autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that map the sea without a human pilot. The vehicle is under 1.8 metres long, less than 15 centimetres in diameter, and weighs under 20 kilograms. An ultra-short baseline acoustic system lets an operator track it from the surface out to roughly a kilometre. The company has tested the vehicle in a high-altitude lake in Ladakh and reported Rs 1.19 crore in revenue for the year ended March 2025.

Notably, Hyper Horizon has not recorded any funding round, a gap that stands out against EyeROV's recent raise and may point to longer capital-raising timelines for deep-tech hardware startups in this space.

Sagar Defence Engineering: the larger, funded player

Founded in 2015, Sagar Defence Engineering builds unmanned marine surface vessels, operates UAVs, and developed the Genesis autonomous navigation system. It completed an autonomous coastal voyage called Sagarmala Parikrama in November 2024 and has partnered with Liquid Robotics, a Boeing subsidiary, in 2024 and 2025 to scale unmanned surface vessel systems for maritime security. The company reported approximately $4.68 million in revenue for the year ended March 2024 and closed a Series B round of $25.4 million in December 2024.

Sources differ on the company's total funding: company databases put cumulative funding at $30.1–$48.2 million across six to eight rounds, while other reporting cites only the single $25.4 million Series B. It's not clear from available information how these figures reconcile.

The competitive backdrop

Both Hyper Horizon and Sagar Defence Engineering are named as competing against considerably larger, better-funded American firms — Anduril, Saronic, and Saildrone. No comparative cost or performance data against these firms is available, but the scale gap is explicitly flagged as a competitive risk for the Indian players.

The opportunity

India's coastline stretches over 7,500 kilometres, and the sector's addressable buyers span the Navy, Coast Guard, port authorities, and offshore energy operators — spanning defence, energy, ports, and disaster management use cases. Recent signals, including EyeROV's Navy contract and funding round, suggest institutional demand for domestically built underwater robotics may be growing.

What's still unclear

Valuation figures are not available for any of the three companies. It's also not specified how EyeROV's total funding of over $2 million relates to its Rs 13 crore pre-Series A round, nor are additional investors beyond AWE Funds and Unicorn India Ventures named. Hyper Horizon's go-to-market plans and customer base beyond testing remain undisclosed, and Sagar Defence Engineering's exact number of funding rounds and lead investors are not specified.

Why founders should care

For founders building in hardware, defence-tech, or industrial robotics, this space offers a probabilistic read rather than a settled playbook. EyeROV's Navy order and fresh capital suggest institutional buyers may be growing more willing to adopt Indian-made autonomous systems for both defence and industrial inspection work — a potentially favorable signal for founders selling into similar public-sector or heavy-industry channels. At the same time, Hyper Horizon's technical progress without a recorded funding round hints that deep-tech hardware startups could face longer, harder paths to institutional capital than software peers. The trust barrier EyeROV describes is likely a common hurdle for any startup asking incumbents to replace established manual processes with unproven technology — founders in similar robotics-for-services markets should probably plan for extended sales cycles. Finally, the scale gap against Anduril, Saronic, and Saildrone is a reminder that Indian underwater robotics remains early-stage relative to global peers, which could mean either significant runway for growth or a steep climb to compete internationally, depending on how the market evolves.