The Story
Morsa, a startup building AI agents to run day-to-day operations in manufacturing plants, has raised $1.5 million (about βΉ14 crore) in a pre-seed round led by Jackson Square Ventures, a San Francisco venture firm. The a16z Scout Fund, through which individual scouts invest in early startups on behalf of Andreessen Horowitz, also took part. The company, whose legal name is Lunar Inc., will use the money to develop its product and take it to more plants in India and the US. The valuation was not disclosed.
Morsa calls its product an "AI chief operating officer" for factories. Instead of asking workers to adopt new software, it connects to what a plant already uses: enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems, email, and messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams and Slack. It watches operational data and shop-floor conversations to spot bottlenecks, assign owners to tasks, chase suppliers, re-plan schedules and confirm that work was done.
Its first commercial deployment was at J4S, a 120-employee glass manufacturer, where it ran alongside the plant's ERP and its operational WhatsApp groups. Over four weeks, the company says, it tracked about 900 operational commitments, and the share completed on time rose from 30% to 75%. Morsa says it now works across several plants, including a Tier-1 automotive supplier, covering 212 people in 75 operational group chats. It has not disclosed revenue, pricing or how many customers pay.
Satvik Kapoor, 22, and Vedant Singh, 19, founded the company in June. Kapoor, the chief executive, graduated in computer science from the University of Michigan this year, has worked at Amazon and Perplexity, and grew up around his family's factories in Delhi, running US sales and operations for the family business while at university. Singh, the chief technology officer, is from Lucknow; he began programming at 13 and during the Covid-19 pandemic built a hospital-bed availability platform used by more than 500,000 people. The two met on tech Twitter, won first place together at a Y Combinator hackathon in San Francisco, and say they interviewed more than 200 factory owners, plant managers and supervisors before settling on the product.
Why It Matters
Most factories run on two versions of the truth. The ERP records orders, stock and the production plan. What actually happens each day is settled in WhatsApp groups and phone calls, where a supervisor promises a batch by evening or a purchase manager says material will arrive tomorrow. Those commitments scroll out of sight, and nobody tracks them until something is late. In plants that depend on relationships and informal messages, as many Indian manufacturers do, that gap is where schedules slip.
Morsa's approach is to read the chats rather than replace them. Turning a message into a task with an owner and a deadline, following it up and checking it against the ERP gives managers a record of what was promised without asking floor staff to learn a new screen. That matters because factory software often fails at adoption: workers on the line rarely stop to update a dashboard, but they already answer WhatsApp.
The approach has costs of its own. Running language models over every message in dozens of busy groups is not cheap, and shop-floor chats mix Hindi, English, shorthand and voice notes, which makes them hard to read reliably. Smaller Indian manufacturers are also careful spenders on software, which helps explain why Morsa is selling in the US, where plants pay more, at the same time.
The Strategic Read
The headline result needs careful reading. A rise from 30% to 75% in on-time completion is large, but it comes from one 120-person plant over four weeks, measured by the company. The baseline was probably only visible once Morsa began tracking, and writing deadlines down and following them up tends to lift performance for a while, whoever does the chasing. The test is whether the gain holds after months, once the novelty fades, and at plants beyond the first customer.
Authority and trust are the harder questions. An agent that assigns work and chases suppliers acts in a manager's name, and a wrong instruction on a factory floor wastes material and machine time, so plants are likely to keep a person approving its decisions at first. Reading workers' group chats also means handling their messages and personal details, which plants will need to settle openly with staff. The product leans on WhatsApp, too, whose rules belong to Meta: since January, general-purpose AI assistants have been barred from WhatsApp's business platform, with Meta deciding in its sole discretion what falls under the ban. Morsa has not said how it connects to the groups it reads.
Its defence will have to come from integrations more than the idea. Turning chats into tasks is something other startups, and the large ERP and factory software vendors now adding AI agents of their own, can attempt. Working connections to the systems plants actually run, and a record of how each plant's work tends to slip, are harder to copy.
Jackson Square backed Morsa through JSV Launchpad, its accelerator programme, which lists the company in its S26 batch. That is an early bet for a firm whose main funds have typically led Series A rounds in US software companies, including DocuSign and Strava. The founders bring real advantages: Kapoor's family has run a manufacturing business for about 50 years, which opens doors in a relationship-driven industry, and Singh has already built a product used at scale. But Morsa is five months old, Jackson Square's listing shows a team of two, and selling to factories in two countries at once is a heavy load for a company that size.
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