A robot that inspects the ocean floor for the Indian Navy cannot afford a single bad day. That’s the principle Debendra Pradhan built his company around — and a ₹66-crore Navy contract now backs it.
Coratia Technologies, an Odisha-based deep-tech startup, builds underwater robots — remotely operated and autonomous vehicles — for defence and industrial inspection. The Navy’s order is for Coratia’s flagship vehicle, Jalsimha, which has now been inducted into service.
Founded in 2021 by Debendra Pradhan and Biswajit Swain, Coratia appeared on Shark Tank India Season 3 before a larger strategic round led by defence-focused investor MGF Kavachh. Pradhan, CEO and a mechanical engineering graduate of NIT Rourkela who previously worked at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India, spoke to Business Outreach.
How Coratia started
Coratia traces back to 2014, when the Ministry of Earth Sciences’ institute NIOT Chennai ran a Pan-India underwater robotics contest for students. Pradhan and Swain, then second-year undergraduates, entered “out of enthusiasm.”
The team made the finals that year. The next year, they placed second nationally. The year after, they won India’s autonomous underwater vehicle challenge outright.
That earned an invite to the Singapore AUV Challenge, where they placed second in the world despite a lean budget and inexperienced team. “That was an eye-opener for us,” Pradhan said — proof of real demand for underwater technology, and few people solving for it.
Pradhan and Swain graduated in 2017 and took corporate jobs before launching Coratia full-time in 2021. “We always knew that we would come back,” Pradhan said. The years in between went into “gaining some experience in the corporate world” while preparing for the company.
The fleet: four robots, four jobs
Coratia’s lineup has three ROVs — Jalsimha, Jaladuta and Oceanus — and one autonomous surface vessel, Navya.
Jalsimha is built for the Navy: military-grade certified, sensor-heavy, rated for “more than 1,000 feet” of diving capacity, and carrying a TRL-9 rating & Military grade certification.
Jaladuta targets inland-waterway inspection: dams, bridges, reservoirs. Oceanus is the lightest and most modular of the three, meant for calmer inland waters; Pradhan called it “very easy to deploy and work on.” Navya, the surface vessel, handles hydrographic survey and bathymetry work.
Across the range, Pradhan said the goal was breadth without bulk — building robots “very compact, with a variety of payloads for a variety of use cases.”
The engineering problem: reliability, not depth
Asked about Jalsimha’s toughest engineering challenge, Pradhan pointed to consistency, not diving capacity. The vehicle is certified from minus 10°C to plus 50°C at 90 percent humidity. “It should work 100 percent of the time,” he said. “There must not be even a slight factor of nonoperability.”
He also claimed a compactness edge: “There are very few robots of this kind which have this much wide range of application… yet being this compact, this reliable and this powerful.” On cost versus imports, he said comparable systems “come at a multiple of cost… also being not so reliable.”
The Navy contract: tested past spec
The Jalsimha order came through the government’s iDEX defence-innovation program, after what Pradhan described as rigorous scrutiny and pre-set testing guidelines.
The vehicle has since been tested across the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, lakes, quarries and swimming pools — soldiers even tested its stability manually in water for salvage-operation readiness. “The product has gone beyond, already gone beyond the pre-decided testing criteria,” Pradhan said, putting completion of the order at “within a year.”
The contract itself is structured as a multi-year deployment and maintenance deal, with more than 60 percent of it due for completion within 12 to 18 months. It’s sold outright to the Navy — a different model from Jaladuta, which Coratia leases to industrial clients as an “inspection-as-a-service” offering, giving the company a recurring revenue stream alongside its defence sales.
How it was funded
Capital came in stages: roughly ₹1 crore in early NGIS and MeitY grants for prototypes and research, followed by iDEX support once the Navy relationship began, then about ₹17 crore from MGF Kavachh, Piper Serica & SIDBI Pre-Series A round in mid 2025.
When Shark Tank happened
Pradhan credited the show for reach more than funding. “That very platform gave us an opportunity to connect with a vast range of audience at a single go,” he said, adding: “People do recognise our work.”
Before the Shark Tank paperwork was completed, MGF Kavachh came in with a larger, strategic offer. Coratia chose it as lead investor, keeping the Shark Tank investors on as potential side backers.
On Strait of Hormuz threats and India’s cable-repair gap
Pradhan tied Coratia’s relevance directly to threats made against undersea cables during the Strait of Hormuz standoff, noting India’s reliance on cable landing stations on both sides of the peninsula. “It’s better to get prepared,” he said. “Some of the losses due to such a disruption might be irreparable.”
On India’s actual cable-repair capability, he stayed guarded: “It’s a very confidential topic. This question can be asked to the right people in the government.” He was more direct on posture: pre-emptive protection beats post-disruption repair, and the underlying market — mineral exploration, underwater infrastructure, underwater warfare defence — is “growing year by year.”
A platform, not just a vehicle
Pradhan framed Coratia’s technology as more flexible than a single-purpose ROV. “The autonomy built in our platform doesn’t make it only ROV, but the ROV can also operate it like an autonomous robot also,” he said — a distinction he ties to competing globally rather than just serving Indian defence and industrial clients.
Expansion plans
Coratia is working to extend Jalsimha, Jaladuta, Navya and Oceanus into ports, oil and gas, and infrastructure clients, alongside newer AI-powered robots built for different depth, endurance and payload profiles.
Overseas clients have already approached the company directly, Pradhan said, even after scouting local providers first, because “there are certain problem statements, certain critical operations, which not all the companies or startups are capable of doing.”
He tied the export ambition to the government’s manufacturing push: building a global supply chain out of India is about “reaffirming our stance with the vision of our government, which is built in India and built for the world.”
