BusinessWire India
Chennai (Tamil Nadu) [India], August 6: Solinas Integrity Private Limited, a Chennai-based company pioneering full-stack robotics and AI solutions for underground water and sanitation infrastructure, has raised $5.5 million in a Series A1 funding round. The round was co-led by Mela Ventures and Hero Enterprise Family Office with participation from Luthra Group and follow-on investments from existing investors SVL-SME Fund (managed by SBI Ventures Limited), Rainmatter Capital, and 8X Ventures Fund I.
The round marks a significant milestone in Solinas’ mission to transform the inspection, cleaning, and management of critical water, wastewater, and sanitation infrastructure through robotics and artificial intelligence.
The capital will be used to expand manufacturing capacity, product development, strengthen software infrastructure, and support working capital requirements as Solinas scales government and enterprise contracts. Alongside domestic expansion, Solinas will deepen its international sales footprint, with a strategic focus on the Middle East and Southeast Asia (SEA) markets. Solinas will invest in new product development to widen its technology portfolio across WASH, industrial applications, and defense.
Founded in 2018 and incubated at IIT Madras, Solinas has built an integrated full-stack robotics platform for underground water and sanitation infrastructure, spanning inspection, sanitation, and AI-powered infrastructure intelligence. The company was co-founded by Divanshu Kumar (CEO) and Moinak Banerjee (CTO).
The company has deployed its solutions across more than 30 cities and 15 states, serving municipalities and enterprise customers, including an active international deployment with Dubai Municipality. Solinas has been recognized by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for its contribution to India’s water and sanitation mission. CEO Divanshu Kumar was named to Forbes India’s 30 Under 30 list in 2025, and the company was recently selected as the subject of a Harvard Business Publishing case study now used by business schools across six continents.
“Solinas has come this far by proving that the technology & the model works, city after city, contract after contract, at a sizable scale. As we enter our next phase, we have the leadership team as well as the backing of mission aligned institutional investors in place to build India’s largest tech company in the underground asset management space. From here, we’re also extending into adjacent, highstakes sectors — starting with Oil & Gas and Defence, where the same discipline around critical, unseen infrastructure applies.”
— Divanshu Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO, Solinas Integrity
Solinas is addressing a largely invisible but critical infrastructure challenge. India is estimated to lose 38% of its treated water before it reaches consumers, with losses exceeding 60% in some cities. Globally, Non-Revenue Water results in an estimated $39 billion in annual losses. At the same time, despite a ban on manual scavenging, more than 7,00,000 people remain engaged in the manual cleaning of sewers and septic tanks, with 377 sanitation workers losing their lives between 2019 and 2023. These challenges are creating an urgent need for technology-led inspection, monitoring, and mechanized sanitation solutions.
The opportunity is further reinforced by government-led infrastructure programmes such as AMRUT, Jal Jeevan Mission, and the NAMASTE scheme, which are driving adoption of modern inspection and sanitation technologies through an estimated $1.5-2 billion in annual public and multilateral investment.
“Current methods of maintaining India’s water infrastructure are manual, hazardous, time-consuming, and costly, with virtually no visibility into what lies beneath. Solinas is changing that through a vertically integrated robotics platform that maps underground infrastructure, diagnoses issues, and delivers end-to-end solutions. At Mela Ventures, we have followed Divanshu and the team’s journey for four years, and their growth has been remarkable. Backing fearless founders solving globally hard problems from India is core to our investment philosophy, and Solinas is one of the best examples of that.”
— Krishnakumar Natarajan, Managing Partner, Mela Ventures
To address this market, Solinas has developed three integrated products.
* Endobot, Asia’s first robotic pipeline inspection system capable of navigating pipes as small as 90 mm.
* HomoSEP mechanises sewer and septic tank cleaning at depths of up to 20 meters, eliminating the need for human entry into hazardous confined spaces.
* SWASTH AI transforms inspection data into GIS-mapped asset inventories, AI-driven defect classification, and predictive remaining-useful-life analytics, powered by a proprietary Indian pipeline dataset.
Together, these solutions provide utilities with a comprehensive, end-to-end platform for inspection, cleaning, and asset management.
Resources (founder images, & logos) – [Solinas Press Kit]
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