People assume I started Muks Robotics because I loved robots. That’s only half true. I actually started because I was tired of watching brilliant engineers in India build world-class prototypes that never made it beyond college competitions. We’d build drones that flew better than half the imported ones, robotic arms that could pick up screws from the floor, autonomous bots that could dodge obstacles like trained athletes — and then what? They’d get packed into cardboard boxes to gather dust in someone’s garage.

I hated that cycle. I hated the waste of talent more than anything.

I grew up in Coimbatore in a small house right behind a machine shop. Every morning, before school, I would stand at the open shutters and watch the workers shape metal. Sparks, grease, noise — that was my childhood. I used to think machines were alive because they had rhythm. Their movement made sense to me in a way people sometimes didn’t. I built my first robot at thirteen out of scrap metal, a bicycle chain, and a motor pulled out of a broken ceiling fan. It didn’t do much except crawl across the floor like a lazy cockroach, but to me, it felt like magic.

Fast-forward a few years, engineering college was a shock. Not because the syllabus was hard — that part I could handle — but because the gap between potential and opportunity was massive. Students who could build incredible things ended up learning from outdated textbooks and spending more time filling in lab records than innovating. We had world-class brains stuck inside pre-2000 curriculums. It bothered me more than I could explain.

After college, I landed a stable job at a robotics lab. Good salary, good office, good team. And I was miserable. Every idea needed approval from five committees. Every prototype needed “business direction.” I didn’t want to pitch robots; I wanted to build them.

One night, after yet another project got shelved because it was “too experimental,” I walked out and never went back. I didn’t have a plan — I had frustration, a second-hand laptop, and a head full of unfinished ideas. I rented a small room above a tyre shop and turned it into my workshop. That’s where Muks Robotics was born.

Our first robot, SPACEO-M1, wasn’t elegant. In fact, it was slightly terrifying. It beeped randomly, overheated every hour, and once tried to throw a wrench at me. But it worked. It was fast, adaptable, and learned patterns quicker than expected. When I showed it to a small manufacturing unit in Hosur, they didn’t care that it looked rough — they cared that it could do a repetitive task perfectly without complaining.

That’s when I realized who I really wanted to build for — not multinational factories with million-dollar budgets, but the thousands of small workshops that hustle every single day with limited manpower and outdated machines.

Muks Robotics is for them. For the people who fix things with improvisation, tape, and grit. For the engineers who have ideas but no platform. For the dreamers who believe robots shouldn’t just exist in YouTube videos and Silicon Valley labs.

I’m not building luxury robots. I’m building practical, stubborn, hardworking machines — the kind that fit into the real India. And I’m not stopping until every small workshop that wants automation can finally afford it.