Ola Electric’s Former AI Director is Building New Robotics Startup

The Ola mafia is getting bigger. In the latest exit, Srikanth Vidapanakal, former director of artificial intelligence at Ola Electric, has announced that he is founding a new robotics startup, xSpecies AI. 

According to the LinkedIn page, xSpecies AI is a robotics company aiming to develop physical AI software and hardware systems for building a range of general purpose robots and humanoids in India for the world.

“Our mission is to develop a foundational, end-to-end technology stack for general purpose robots that will be manufactured and deployed at scale in commercial applications by 2026 to significantly improve operational productivity and efficiency,” the bio read. 

“This will culminate in the development and launch of our fully autonomous Humanoid for general purpose use in both business as well as consumer applications by the year 2027.”

According to the official website, the startup is building AIWare, which is the startup’s proprietary two-stage AI architecture that integrates a vision-language-action (VLA) model with reinforcement learning (RL). 

Additionally, the team is also building HANDY (hierarchical AI for neural dexterity and yield-driven manipulation), a dexterous robotic arm designed for pick-and-sort applications in logistics and warehouse environments, along with MANAV, a general-purpose humanoid robot developed in India for global deployment. 

The startup’s core technology platform is Species22, which underpins the development of its humanoid robots. It includes a modular and scalable architecture, integrated AI and control systems, and supports rapid development and deployment of humanoid robots tailored to diverse use cases.

Vidapanakal announced his exit from Ola Electric last month. He joined Ola Cabs as one of the first engineers in the autonomous driving team and has worked on passive ADAS (advanced driver-assistance systems), CCTV video analytics, voice recognition, autonomous driving, and robot manipulation.

Lately, there have been several announcements about notable exits from Ola and Krutrim for building their own startups. 

Read: Indian Tech Veterans are Abandoning Corporates for AI Startups

For example, Vipul Shah, VP of products at Krutrim, has started working on his stealth AI startup in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. According to his LinkedIn, his startup is focusing on generative AI, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR), edge devices, and agentic AI solutions.

Other executives who have left Bhavish Aggarwal-led Krutrim are Gautam Bhargava, VP and head of engineering; Samrat Saha, director of machine learning; Achal Kumar Mall, director of product management; Mikhil Raj, senior director of product management, and Ashok Jagannathan, vice president. These exits were first reported by The Economic Times.

Even though there are no confirmed updates about most of them building an AI startup as most haven’t updated their LinkedIn profiles after Krutrim, Jagannathan is surely building Agrani Labs as its co-founder and chief architect along with Dheemanth Nagaraj, Sri Nimmagadda, and Rajesh Vivekanandham, all of whom have prior experience of working at AMD India.