A Charlotte startup is using robotics to automate an industry that the founder says has been left behind by artificial intelligence: physical manufacturing.
Kashyap Gaglani has over a decade of experience working with AI initiatives across global supply chains, exploring frontier technologies like agentic AI and computer vision applications to automate operations faster. His first venture, RoboLeanX, was inspired by the gaps in manual, physical work on manufacturing floors, specifically in the electronics and automotive industries.
“Eventually, if you average it out, around 70% of tasks are still done manually,” Gaglani said. “Even in the age of high automation and technology, manufacturing still suffers from tasks that are not yet automated.”
Gaglani added that most manufacturing companies are going through labor shortages, struggling to find the skilled workers needed to keep pace with demand. He believes his startup can fill the gaps by using robotics and live vision automated with AI.
RoboLeanX offers hardware-agnostic software, meaning their solution can work with existing hardware while also providing an end-to-end solution for companies. The main product they’ve been preparing for the last four months is the cognitive robot, a stationary robot with two arms that is capable of learning on the job.
“An example [of a use case] would be sorting components,” Gaglani explained. “If you want a person to sort these five types of nuts or bolts, this requires an understanding of the materials, placement and flexibility.”
Putting the bots to work
After eight weeks of training, these cognitive robots will take these responsibilities, and in doing so free up operators to work on other tasks.
The way that these robots will learn and evolve through their tasks is through a camera feed, whereby AI will work not only to detect the materials, but also to perform quality inspections on them—determining if any are defective, scratched, etc.
“One, people are engaged in… mundane but repetitive tasks, like visual quality inspection, while they could be contributing to other more urgent tasks,” Gaglani said. “Second, most human inspections are error-prone, because at every shift people will change the skill set, so not everyone would be as accurate with their analysis.”
Another use case that Gaglani is excited for is ensuring safety on factory floors. These cameras can be placed throughout the floor and will work faster and smarter than the typical CCTV setup. The evolving AI would then be able to do things like spot someone not wearing a hard hat or analyze near-misses from risky behavior.
For these vision technologies, Gaglani said the AI would take less than a week to learn about defects, quality and safety.
“This is preventative safety, because you just don’t want to be reactive but proactive, and this is going to change the way we perceive it as video analysis,” Gaglani emphasized.
RoboLeanX continues to test the effectiveness of these technologies while on the job, but what they’ve found so far is that their solution will reduce cycle time by 60%. Gaglani explained that this is due to the robots’ ability to work non-stop, as well as the AI being inherently faster than the human eye.
“Processing time goes up 60% and I’m not promising 100% or 200%, as in some cases it might require a second, so we averaged it out in terms of efficiency,” Gaglani continued. “In terms of efficiency, or at least impact to quality, your defect rate goes down by 70%, and that’s what benefit this technology brings.”
Building RoboLeanX to last
Gaglani said that the company plans to work on a subscription-based model, but is currently implementing pilot programs with companies with no upfront cost—a unique approach he said RoboLeanX is taking.
“We want to prove that this works and that there is a clear ROI,” Gaglani said. “The reason for this approach is that cognitive robotics is a very new concept for most manufacturers. Our approach is to let us prove it first, and once it’s proven, we convert it to a subscription model…. Our promise is that companies will break even for this investment in less than six months.”
But with any hardware, especially robotics, it’s a capital-intensive business and investment. That’s why Gaglani said they are gearing up for their pre-seed round in this quarter after being bootstrapped since inception. RoboLeanX was recently part of the Spring 2026 cohort of the RIoT Accelerator Program (RAP).
QUICK BITS
Startup: RoboLeanX
Founder: Kashyap Gaglani
Founded: 2026
Team size: 2
Location: Charlotte
Website: roboleanx.com
Funding: Bootstrapped, raising pre-seed
While RoboLeanX was inspired by bigger companies to transform the manufacturing world, Gaglani said their technologies will be centered around small- to medium-sized enterprises.
“We want to democratize this AI for everyone in manufacturing,” Gaglani said. “They’re meant for people who are getting challenged with labor, high costs, repetitive jobs, and also those who always wanted to try this concept, but the barrier was high cost of at least testing or implementation or proof of concept.”
Gaglani said that if people are interested and face the same problems, they should reach out to RoboLeanX to learn how it will work in their factories.
“I think manufacturing is one space where it is relatively not untouched in a way other industries have been transformed by AI, so it also brings huge opportunities,” Gaglani continued. “And this is how we see it, and we believe that this would greatly help to revitalize manufacturing in America.”
