The next major frontier for AI is the physical world, but getting there requires software infrastructure that doesn't yet exist. To help build it, Ankur Capital led the $3 million seed round in CraftifAI.
The embedded software industry has had the same structural problem for decades. As AI moves from the cloud to the edge, into robots, drones, factory floors, automotive systems, and consumer devices, engineers are being asked to build increasingly complex hardware-software systems on toolchains that were designed to sell chips, not empower developers. Every microcontroller, FPGA, and edge AI processor comes with its own vendor-specific environment. Firmware has to be written from scratch. Drivers are generated manually. Debugging requires deep specialist knowledge that takes years to build. The result is that even experienced teams spend the majority of their time on repetitive, low-leverage work and product launches slip.
CraftifAI's Orbit changes this. Orbit is an agentic AI platform that consolidates these fragmented workflows into a single AI-driven environment, automating firmware generation, driver development, and AI model deployment across edge, IoT, and FPGA platforms, without locking engineers into specific hardware vendors. Early customers report that tasks which previously took days now take minutes.
The urgency of this is only growing. Globally, smart connected devices are projected to grow from 16 billion today to over 41 billion by 2030, and 1.3 billion autonomous robots to be deployed by 2035. In automotive space, modern vehicles now utilize 3x more sensors and compute nodes than a decade ago. The global pool of embedded software engineers building all of these numbers is just 2.5 million, a critical bottleneck that no amount of hiring will solve quickly enough.
What gives us the most conviction is the founders. Pratik Sharda led PhonePe's SmartSpeaker program from first prototype through distribution, one of the most demanding end-to-end embedded development experiences you can have, navigating hardware constraints, firmware complexity, and manufacturing realities in a single high-stakes product. Yashwant Dagar spent years at AMD (Xilinx) and Sima.ai building edge AI applications for enterprise customers, where vendor lock-in and manual software workflows were a daily, costly reality. These aren't founders who identified this problem from a distance. They built Orbit with the precision of people who know exactly where the time goes and why it matters.
CraftifAI has already secured pilots with several Indian OEMs across robotics, drones, IoT, and AI camera domains, as well as with a US-listed semiconductor company. The best developer tools don't just save time, they expand what engineers believe is possible. That's what CraftifAI is building for the embedded world.
