Building a multi home Indian deep tech company: the CynLr playbook

As we head into 2026, our announcement of a new growth-stage startup fund is but only one of many ways in how India’s deep tech ecosystem is evolving. Companies are emerging from India that are ready to embrace the next phase of growth in commercializing their innovations – including several companies in our own portfolio. 

More often than not, deep science and tech companies see global markets as opportunities, competing against global companies from advanced economies. Ventures from India face constraints, but are rapidly learning to combine the advantages offered by a base in India with focused operations overseas. 

In this essay, we describe one such playbook that the founders at CynLr, Gokul NA and Nikhil Ramaswamy, have developed in taking their robotics company increasingly global. CynLr’s multi-geographic footprint — with headquarters in Bengaluru, advanced research operations in Switzerland, and a customer-facing presence in the US — represents a pragmatic model that may define the next generation of Indian deep-tech companies. 

The architecture is not merely symbolic. It reflects a calculated recognition that foundational innovation, customer proximity, and operational efficiency require distributed presence across multiple geographies as commercial growth takes centre stage. 

Swiss R&D

CynLr opened its Design and Research Centre in Prilly, Switzerland, in September 2024, positioning itself alongside EPFL's Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA) and CSEM (Centre Suisse d'Électronique et de Microtechnique). Simultaneously, the company established customer-facing operations in the US, recognising that perhaps its biggest revenue base and largest growth market lies with American automotive manufacturers and logistics companies. 

Ramaswamy has shifted his base to America to lead customer engagement and product strategy for the US market. This marks a calibrated distribution of resources across three distinct functions: research and foundational innovation in Switzerland, customer relationships and go-to-market in the US, and engineering execution and manufacturing operations in Bengaluru. 

The Bengaluru lab, which housed 25 robotic systems in 2024, is projected to more than double by 2026, forming the core of engineering and manufacturing operations. This is where CynLr’s three-arm robotic platforms are built, where field testing is conducted, and where integration with customer systems happens at scale. 

The Swiss centre expands capabilities in perception, vision algorithms, hardware design, and software architecture — the foundational problems that require proximity to world-leading robotics research. The US presence anchors the task of translating technical capabilities into solutions that solve customer problems, securing deployments, and ensuring that the technology roadmap aligns with market demands.

This three-point model taps the distinct advantages each location offers. For research, Switzerland provides access to EPFL's robotics ecosystem. LASA, directed by Professor Aude Billard, President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, conducts foundational work in robot control, machine learning, and human-robot interaction, precisely aligned with the perception and manipulation challenges CynLr solves. 

The laboratory's research on robot learning from demonstration and dexterous bimanual manipulation represents the frontier of the field. Proximity to this research is not a luxury; it is essential for a company pursuing breakthroughs in general-purpose manipulation. 

CynLr's hiring of Dr. Michael Bombile from EPFL exemplifies how the model functions operationally. Bombile, with a decade of experience in advanced robotics under Aude Billard, joined CynLr's Swiss centre to lead research initiatives. Bombile remains in the Swiss ecosystem, maintaining collaboration with EPFL while advancing CynLr's proprietary research. 

CynLr gets access to advanced robotics capability and a researcher capable of advancing core technology while embedded within one of the world's leading robotics laboratories. 

US customer base 

For the US market, American automotive manufacturers such as General Motors, Ford, and suppliers like Denso's US operations represent the highest-value, most demanding customer segment in robotics. These are customers with stringent requirements, complex integration challenges, and substantial budgets. More importantly, they expect to engage with founders and core product teams who understand their business deeply and can commit to long-term partnerships. 

Ramaswamy's move signals commitment to these customers in a way that quarterly visits from Bengaluru cannot. It also positions CynLr within the American innovation ecosystem, where venture capital, partnerships with system integrators, and collaboration with academic institutions like MIT and Carnegie Mellon occur naturally. 

The talent and infrastructure economics reinforce this geography. Switzerland offers access to researchers with doctoral expertise, decades of experience in precision engineering, and familiarity with European manufacturing standards. Although salaries in Switzerland are substantially higher than in India (about 3-5X) annually, this premium reflects access to a specific cadre of researchers irreplaceable elsewhere. 

The US, for customer-facing roles, offers similar logic: American sales engineers, product managers, and business development professionals who understand the automotive industry command premium salaries, but their expertise in navigating American procurement processes, regulatory requirements, and technical standards is invaluable. 

India as the strategic and economic base for innovation

India anchors CynLr’s strategy and economics as its innovation base, with CynLr maintaining in Bengaluru a substantial core engineering team building production systems, conducting field integration work, and iterating on designs.

CynLr’s innovation is built on the strength of India’s rising engineering talent and its expanding global influence. Leading engineering institutes are sharply increasing innovation output as over 50 universities are now in the QS World University Rankings, signaling country’s growing academic and research credibility. This quality is validated globally as multinational companies continue to expand high-value R&D and engineering centers in India, such as Chevron’s large innovation hub in Bengaluru because Indian engineers are now trusted not just to execute, but to design, innovate, and lead foundational technology development.

India also offers a maturing supply chain for precision manufacturing, proximity to factories where customer pilots occur, and a domestic market that, while smaller than the US, is growing rapidly. The labour cost advantage enables CynLr to scale manufacturing and integration operations.

This three-point model addresses a persistent challenge in deep-tech startups: the tension between innovation and commercialisation. CynLr’s founders have articulated this challenge explicitly – with their previous experience at National Instruments and later as consultants observing how manufacturers attempt to adopt automation. They’ve seen several instances where technically sophisticated systems failed to gain traction because they solved elegantly defined problems rather than real operational challenges. 

The geographic distribution also creates natural separation of concerns. Ramaswamy, based in the US, can make customer commitments and define product roadmaps based on market intelligence. The Swiss research centre, within Gokul’s ambit, can pursue longer-term challenges: improving perception robustness, developing new manipulation techniques, or exploring novel hardware designs. The Bengaluru team, strategically innovating while being focused on execution, can scale manufacturing and integration. 

CynLr's model also addresses a credibility challenge that many Indian deep-tech startups face. Western customers often harbour doubts about technology developed entirely in India, not because of quality concerns but because they lack visibility into research processes and partnerships. By establishing a research centre alongside EPFL, CynLr signals that its innovation is anchored in world-leading research institutions. 

India is developing a policy environment to be more supportive of the needs of its budding deep tech startups. For example, the Ministry of Electronics and IT’s Global Startup Bridge initiative explicitly encourages Indian deep-tech startups to establish partnerships and operations in Europe and Japan. 

Private-public initiatives are emerging too. The India-Japan Emerging Tech Corridor actively recruits Indian founders to maintain research presence while retaining operational footholds at home. The US-India Deep Tech Investment Alliance, launched in 2025, envisages five-to-ten-year partnerships where companies operate across multiple geographies optimised for their particular needs.

The distributed model is not without complications. Maintaining coherent strategy across three time zones, managing research-to-product pipelines across geographies, and navigating different regulatory and tax environments introduce operational overheads. Yet the alternative — attempting to build foundational robotics capability entirely within a single geography while competing for global customers — has proven less successful. 

As India's government continues to invest in deep-tech innovation, and as capital flows into robotics, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing, the distributed model will likely become increasingly common. Companies like CynLr demonstrate that the question is not whether Indian startups should operate globally, they should, but how they can do so efficiently while tapping India's distinct advantages. 

The model combines strengths across regions: advanced research in hubs like Switzerland, customer relationships and go-to-market presence in the largest markets, particularly the US and in India, a strategic center defined by talent density, execution velocity, and long-term advantage within a growing innovation ecosystem.

This is neither wholly Indian nor wholly Western, but rather a network optimised for the particular requirements of deep-tech innovation today. It requires founders willing to be distributed, investors comfortable with geographic diversity, and regulatory frameworks that facilitate international collaboration. CynLr's playbook may prove to be the template that allows Indian deep-tech companies to compete at the frontier of robotics and advanced manufacturing.