The robotics story in Southeast Asia has always followed a familiar pattern. A manufacturer in Thailand would run a pilot with autonomous mobile robots on one section of a factory floor. A logistics company in Singapore would trial drone-based inventory scanning in a single warehouse. An agricultural cooperative in Malaysia would test precision spraying across a few hectares. The technology would work well enough, the press release would go out, and then the deployment would quietly stay exactly where it was.
The conditions that kept robotics stuck at the pilot stage, including high upfront costs, complex programming requirements, limited local technical support and thin ROI timelines, are being addressed not by global robotics giants dropping enterprise solutions into the region, but by startups that have built specifically for how Southeast Asian businesses actually operate. The Southeast Asia industrial and service robot market was valued at USD 1.21 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach USD 1.83 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 7.24%, driven by heightened automation incentives, labour scarcity in core manufacturing hubs and the migration of electronics assembly out of coastal China.
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What is shifting is the market size as well as the nature of the conversations happening on factory floors and in warehouse operations across the region. Companies are no longer asking whether automation makes sense and are now curious about how to deploy it faster and justify the investment within a predictable timeframe.
Botsync (Singapore)
Botsync builds autonomous mobile robots and the software platform that makes them work together. Its SyncOS platform is designed to be vendor-agnostic, meaning it can coordinate robots from different manufacturers within a single facility rather than locking operators into one hardware ecosystem. That flexibility matters in manufacturing environments where equipment decisions were made years apart and rarely with interoperability in mind.
In January 2026, Botsync received additional funding from SGInnovate as part of its extended Series A round. The company reported 240% growth in production trips, crossing one million live production trips in 2025, alongside 230% revenue growth driven by expansion from existing customers. The growth coming from existing customers scaling up rather than new contract signings is the more meaningful signal. It suggests the technology is performing reliably in live production environments rather than in controlled conditions. Clients include Ford, Caterpillar, Kimberly-Clark, Coca-Cola and Nestlé. Botsync has also expanded into Australia and South Africa through strategic partnerships and is preparing to launch in the US market through a partnership with SK International.
Augmentus (Singapore)
Robot programming has historically been one of the most stubborn friction points in industrial automation. Traditional approaches require vendor-specific expertise, take weeks to complete and break down the moment production requirements shift. For manufacturers running high-mix, low-volume operations, that rigidity makes automation impractical regardless of the hardware cost.
Founded in 2019, Augmentus aims to make industrial robots as easy to programme as smartphones. Its no-code platform integrates 3D scanning, AI-driven path planning and adaptive motion control to generate robot programmes in minutes rather than weeks. In a high-mix valve powder-coating deployment, the platform cut robot downtime by 93% and reduced programming cycles from weeks to minutes. In July 2025, the company raised USD 11 million in a Series A+ round led by Woori Venture Partners with participation from Singapore’s EDBI to scale autonomous robotic surface finishing and welding solutions across Asia-Pacific and North America. A subsequent strategic investment from Applied Ventures, the venture arm of Applied Materials, adds credibility in precision manufacturing, where programming flexibility matters most.
Aonic (Malaysia)
While much of the automation conversation in Southeast Asia centres on factories and warehouses, agriculture represents one of the most practically urgent opportunities in the region. Farming across Southeast Asia is labour-intensive, weather-dependent and chronically short-staffed, which makes it an obvious candidate for drone-based solutions if those solutions can be made affordable and field-ready for operators who are not technologists.
Aonic secured USD 10 million in Series A funding in March 2026, led by Kairous Capital, to accelerate regional and international expansion and scale its Malaysia-built drones, software and services. What distinguishes Aonic from a purely technology-focused play is its end-to-end operational model. The company designs, engineers and manufactures its own drones and software in-house, and operates more than 50 sales, service and spare parts centres across Southeast Asia. In markets where operators are farmers with limited technical training, on-the-ground support often determines whether a deployment lasts beyond the first season. Aonic has grown at a triple-digit CAGR since 2022, reaching more than USD 60 million in annual revenue, and has been profitable since 2023.
Movel AI (Singapore)
Deploying a single robot is one challenge. Managing a fleet of them across a live operational environment, where routes change, tasks shift and robots from different vendors need to coordinate without conflict, is a different problem entirely and one that becomes more acute as deployments scale.
Movel AI’s fleet management platform controls and monitors fleets of over 100 mobile robots in real time, enabling task scheduling, performance analytics and multi-robot coordination. The company also offers a single-robot deployment system designed so that operators without deep robotics expertise can get a robot running quickly without complex setup or extended onboarding. Founded in 2016 and backed by 500 Global, SGInnovate and Enterprise Singapore, Movel AI has built its business around simplifying both deployment and day-to-day management across logistics, manufacturing, construction and healthcare. As organisations move from one or two robots to multi-robot environments, the management overhead becomes a genuine operational constraint.
Infermove (via Grab acquisition)
Infermove represents a different kind of signal in the Southeast Asian robotics landscape: an acquisition rather than an independent growth story, but one that says something important about where the industry is heading and which problems are now considered worth solving at platform scale.
Founded in 2021, Infermove focuses on autonomous delivery robots, including sidewalk delivery robots with upper-limb manipulation capabilities. Its Carri series robots have operated with major delivery platforms in China, including Meituan, Alibaba’s Ele.me and JD.com’s Dada. In January 2026, Grab acquired Infermove to strengthen its first-and last-mile delivery capabilities, saying it would further develop Infermove’s solutions outside Singapore to complement Grab’s delivery network. For a platform operating at Grab’s scale, even marginal improvements in delivery automation translate into high cost and reliability gains across millions of transactions. Amid rising labour costs and sustained growth in on-demand delivery, Grab framed the deal as part of its effort to advance automation across its expanding logistics network.
What separates deployment from demonstration
Looking across these five companies, a pattern emerges that is worth naming clearly. None of them is leading with hardware complexity or research ambition. Botsync’s value is not that it makes the best robot, but that it makes different robots work together. Augmentus removes a programming bottleneck that has blocked adoption for years. Aonic succeeds in agriculture not just because its drones work but because it has invested in the service infrastructure that keeps them working after the sale. Movel AI solves the management problem that appears once a fleet grows beyond what a single operator can track manually.
Governments across Southeast Asia are compressing payback periods by funding up to 70% of qualified automation outlays, cutting the capital needed for a six-axis industrial unit from USD 50,000 to USD 70,000 down to as low as USD 15,000 to USD 25,000 in some markets. The robotics companies that will define this region over the next five years are the ones making automation practical for the operator who did not study engineering and not just for the one who did.