Startup Story · Underwater Robotics · Made in Odisha
Two Engineers Built Robots That Dive Where Humans Can't — Then Walked Into Shark Tank India
How Coratia Technologies turned ₹80 Lakhs and 1% equity into a deal that could reshape India's infrastructure safety industry.
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Somewhere beneath the surface of India's rivers and reservoirs, thousands of dam walls and bridge pillars sit in the dark — corroding, cracking, quietly degrading. The law says they must be inspected twice a year. The problem? Human divers can only go so deep, stay so long, and see so little. For decades, engineers have been patching this gap with guesswork.
Devendra and Vishwajit, two engineering batchmates from NIT Rourkela, decided that was unacceptable. They went back to first principles, back to the water — and built machines to do what humans simply cannot.
"India has thousands of large dams and bridges that need structural inspections twice a year by law. But human divers face life-threatening depth limitations, high costs, and the inability to capture accurate engineering data underwater."
— Devendra & Vishwajit, Founders, Coratia TechnologiesA Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
India's infrastructure is aging. With over 5,000 large dams and hundreds of thousands of bridges spanning rivers and rail lines, the stakes for structural failure are enormous. Dam collapses and bridge deterioration are not hypothetical disasters — they are recorded events with very real human costs.
The current inspection process relies almost entirely on human divers, who face severe limitations: dangerous depth thresholds, dangerous currents, murky visibility, and the fundamental inability to perform precise engineering measurements while battling water pressure. When a diver does manage to go down, what comes back up is largely subjective — visual impressions rather than engineering data.
Coratia Technologies, a deep-tech startup quietly operating out of Odisha, identified this gap and built an entirely new answer to it.
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Meet the Machines: Jaldoot & Jalsimha
Coratia's fleet currently comprises two products, each designed for a different depth of mission.
Service Class · Civil
Jaldoot
A compact ROV designed for dam inspections, bridge pillar scans, and marine growth cleaning. Uses high-definition video combined with acoustic sonar to map underwater structures with engineering precision.
≈ ₹50 Lakhs per unit
Defense Grade · Naval
Jalsimha
A high-end underwater drone engineered for the Indian Navy. Capable of operating in deep, demanding environments where commercial ROVs cannot venture. Military-grade build and classification.
≈ ₹2 Crores per unit
What makes Coratia genuinely different from a hardware company is their service-first business model. They don't sell robots to clients who then have to operate them. Instead, they deploy their own trained crews, perform the complete inspection, and hand over a comprehensive structural report. This is a subscription-style managed service wrapped inside deep-tech hardware — and it dramatically changes the revenue story.
Walking Into the Tank
When Devendra and Vishwajit walked onto the Shark Tank India set, they asked for ₹80 Lakhs in exchange for 1% equity — valuing Coratia at a bold ₹80 Crores. For a deep-tech startup from a tier-2 city in India, that number raised eyebrows.
The sharks were immediately intrigued by the problem statement. India's dam and bridge inspection market is not glamorous, but it is enormous, mandated by law, and almost completely unaddressed by modern technology. Three sharks, however, backed out — citing either a lack of core industry expertise to add meaningful strategic value, or skepticism about the founders' projection of reaching ₹50 Crores in revenue within a single year.
That left two sharks who saw opportunity where the others saw risk.
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The Negotiation: Clean Deal vs. Royalty Clause
Offered ₹80 Lakhs for 1% equity — matching the ask — but added a 1% royalty clause until ₹1.6 Crores was repaid. A common Shark Tank India structure that protects the investor's downside.
Aman stepped in with the cleanest possible offer: ₹80 Lakhs for exactly 1% equity, zero royalties, zero strings. He matched the founders' ask in full — a rare move on the show.
Devendra and Vishwajit chose Aman Gupta's offer. No royalty burden means every rupee of future revenue stays with the company longer — a critical advantage for a capital-intensive hardware business.
Why This Deal Matters for Indian Deep Tech
- Coratia is one of the first Indian ROV companies to pitch on national television, putting underwater robotics on the mainstream map.
- The service model de-risks the technology for government and corporate clients who would never buy and operate a robot themselves.
- Defense validation via the Indian Navy gives Jalsimha a credibility moat that private competitors will struggle to replicate.
- Aman Gupta's boAt brand connects to mass consumer electronics — his network in supply chain and manufacturing could directly accelerate Coratia's hardware scaling.
- The ₹80 Crore valuation signals growing investor appetite for deep tech beyond software and fintech in India.
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What Comes Next for Coratia?
The immediate challenge is scale. Coratia's technology is proven, their clients are real government and corporate entities, and their pricing — ₹10 to ₹12 Lakhs for a basic 5-to-7-day bridge inspection — is positioned well for the value delivered. But deep-tech hardware businesses require sustained capital to build production capacity, train field crews, and manage long enterprise sales cycles.
With Aman Gupta's investment and network now in their corner, the founders have access to both capital and a public platform that could dramatically compress their sales cycle. Government tenders, state irrigation departments, the National Highways Authority, railway bridge maintenance divisions — these are all potential clients who may now have Coratia's number.
The advanced tier of their service — predictive structural modeling using the data their robots collect — is also potentially the most valuable long-term offering. Infrastructure managers don't just want to know what a dam wall looks like today; they want to know when it will need intervention. That predictive analytics layer is where Coratia could shift from service provider to platform business.
The Bigger Story: India's Infrastructure Gap Meets Deep Tech
Coratia's journey is not just a startup story. It reflects a broader and urgent reality: India is building fast, but legacy infrastructure requires equally urgent attention. The country's dams are aging. Its railway bridges carry millions of passengers daily across structures that have never seen a proper underwater inspection. The gap between what the law mandates and what is actually delivered is enormous.
Two engineers from Odisha decided to close that gap — not with a better spreadsheet or a faster app, but with machines that think, dive, and see in the dark. The sharks may have been divided, but the market is clear: this problem is real, the technology works, and the timing is right.
India's dams and bridges need inspections twice a year. Most have never seen the inside of a proper underwater scan. Coratia isn't selling a robot — it's selling certainty to engineers who have been operating on guesswork for decades.
Whether Coratia hits ₹50 Crores in a year or takes three, the direction is unmistakable. The ocean floor, the river bed, the dark underbelly of India's most critical infrastructure — that territory now has a flag planted in it. And it was planted by two engineers from NIT Rourkela who refused to accept that humans should be the last line of defence for a problem machines can solve better.
Robots Below. Vision Above.
Coratia Technologies is proof that the most important problems in India don't always come with a clean UX and a venture-capital pedigree. Sometimes they live 60 metres underwater — and they're waiting for someone brave enough to build something that goes down to meet them.