The Indian Navy has placed a Rs 66 crore order with Coratia Technologies, a Rourkela-based startup, for indigenous underwater remotely operated vehicles. The contract, awarded in September 2025 under the Ministry of Defence's iDEX scheme, is the largest validation yet for India's tiny but growing deep-sea robotics industry.
Coratia builds machines that inspect, map and monitor structures beneath the surface: bridge piers, dam walls, ship hulls, pipelines and undersea internet cables. Until now, that work has largely depended on foreign suppliers or human divers, both expensive and risky options.
From a College Lab to the Ocean Floor
The company began as a student project at NIT Rourkela. Debendra Pradhan and Biswajit Swain, both mechanical engineering graduates from the 2017 batch, joined a research group building underwater robots from scratch. A challenge issued by the Ministry of Earth Sciences, asking teams to build an autonomous underwater vehicle that could navigate and hit a target, gave them their first real test. They won.
That win exposed a gap. India's underwater robotics ecosystem was almost nonexistent. After stints in corporate jobs at home and abroad, the two returned to Rourkela and founded Coratia full-time in 2021.
What the Robots Actually Do
Coratia makes two kinds of vehicles. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) stay tethered to a surface pilot who steers them through a cable. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) navigate on their own. Both carry cameras, sonar and positioning systems built for murky water where GPS signals do not reach and visibility is near zero.
The company layers AI-based inspection on top, including non-destructive testing that evaluates a structure's health without cutting or drilling into it. It runs the full pipeline: deploy the robot, collect data, analyse it and hand back a report.
Why the Navy Deal Matters Beyond Defence
The same hardware that checks a dam for cracks can assess threats around a naval asset. That dual-use overlap lets Coratia serve both industrial and defence clients without maintaining two separate product lines. Its existing customer list already includes Indian Railways, SAIL, IOCL, Tata Steel and the National Institute of Oceanography.
But the Navy contract carries weight that a corporate inspection job does not. India currently relies heavily on imported underwater systems. A domestic supplier that can meet military specifications changes the procurement calculus, especially as global trade restrictions and tariff volatility make foreign sourcing less predictable.
"Induction of indigenous UWROVs not only reduces costs and reliance on foreign suppliers but also combats trade restrictions and tariff uncertainties," said Biswajit Swain, Co-founder and CTO, Coratia Technologies.
The Undersea Cable Angle
One of Coratia's less obvious but strategically important targets is India's undersea cable network. The country depends on submarine fibre-optic cables for the vast majority of its international internet traffic, yet its capacity to inspect and repair those cables is limited. Coratia pitches its robots as a homegrown fix for that vulnerability. In an era of rising geopolitical tension over critical infrastructure, the ability to service your own cables without calling in foreign contractors is not a minor detail.
Funding, Team and the Road Ahead
Coratia has raised roughly Rs 22 crore from Piper Serica Angel Fund, MGF Kavachh and Pontaq Ventures, supplemented by government grants from NGIS, MeitY, DST and Startup Odisha. The team numbers about 32 people and still operates out of the NIT Rourkela incubation centre where the founders started.
The startup is early in its revenue journey. The Navy deal, which followed a pitch on Shark Tank India, signals a shift from one-off demonstration projects to repeatable production and delivery. Whether Coratia can scale manufacturing to meet the Navy's timelines, and then expand into the broader blue economy, is the question that will define its next phase.
Watch whether the company can convert this contract into a sustainable production line, and whether other domestic players emerge to challenge the foreign dominance India has tolerated for decades.