Adviteey Mehaindroo, the founder and CEO of Zinikus, credits CircuitDigest as one of his earliest learning grounds. Now he's sitting down with the same platform, talking about running a robotics company with a half-million-dollar valuation. He describes Zinikus as “a robotics company focused mainly on humanoids, but also catering to the advertising and hospitality sectors with robotics.”
The company’s journey began as a proprietorship with a website that he vaguely remembers as being put together using AI. In 2022, having built multiple robots and participated in competitions across India, Adviteey decided to take things to Dubai for bigger exposure. At the time, he didn’t even know what a pitch deck was or how to approach the business side of things. Today, he is joined by co-founder Tanay Yadav, and the company has grown into a registered private limited entity with operations in India and Dubai, with expansion plans across the UK, US, and Canada.
Reliable Aesthetics
Laughing at his younger self, Adviteey recalled when he thought wiring an ultrasonic sensor to an Arduino board was all it took to make a product. Technically, it does qualify, as it’s all a basic automated gating system would need. However, he has grown to realize that “reliability” is what truly separates a project from a product. A product is designed around how and where it’s to be used, goes through a complete development cycle, and is expected to perform consistently. He also stressed the weight aesthetics hold, especially in humanoids, where appearance is often the first thing a client responds to. “I have seen products in market which do not have features that we offer, but looks better than us. And they sell,” he said. “In humanoids, one of the most important thing is that the finishing should be very good.”
Always On
The autonomous robots that Zinikus makes all have 360-degree perception and typically need to operate in real time, all the time. The reason being that the environment they’re put in keeps changing. Be it a reception area where people move around, or a factory floor where shipments shift around, the robots have to continuously account for what's around them to avoid running into things. Handling dynamic environments like these demands a steady stream of sensory input and fast, coordinated processing. Consistent with this, the company treats how well different nodes in the system, such as those handling sensing and actuation, communicate with each other as a measure of performance.
The Advertisement Robot
Deceptively looking like a display on a circular base, Zephyr, the company’s advertising robot, captures engagement data from viewers. It tracks how people interact with an advertisement, including attention patterns and actions such as scanning a QR code or accessing a link. When asked about how it handles storage between cloud and edge, Adviteey explained that the system supports both, and since the data comes from real people, privacy concerns influence how clients decide whether to keep data onboard or push it to the cloud.
Palm-Sized Plan
Stepping into a client’s organization and demonstrating a robot is something that really excites Adviteey. He defines it as an “exploring kind of emotion” and finds fulfilment in the fact that something they built with their own hands is interesting enough for another organization to want in their space, and that it will go on to make life easier for the people working there. And as an added bonus, he gets to take a peek at how these places operate from the inside.
His advice to engineers eyeing the leap into building their own company is simple. It’s to be “patient” and “very aggressive.” Patience, because maturing a tech product in India takes far longer than most people expect, and aggression for everything else, like chasing follow-ups, going after resources, and showing investors you mean business.
As for what’s next, Zinikus is quietly exploring something beyond its usual lineup, a palm-sized companion with conversational abilities, small enough to sit on a shoulder or be carried around with ease, much like a pair of earphones. The idea stems from a growing concern: rising loneliness and anxiety in India, and the need for something simple that can keep people company.
