Delhi-based manufacturing AI startup Morsa has raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Jackson Square Ventures, with the a16z Scout Fund also participating. The startup will use the money to build its product and take its AI operations platform to more factories in India and the United States.
Morsa operates under its parent company Lunar Inc. and describes its software as an AI chief operating officer for manufacturing plants. It sits on top of the systems a factory already runs, including ERP and manufacturing execution systems, email and messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams and Slack.
What the AI COO actually does
Instead of asking workers to learn a new dashboard, Morsa reads shop-floor conversations and operational data in the tools teams already use. It turns each decision into a job with an owner and a date, then follows up until the work is done.
The platform detects bottlenecks, assigns task ownership, chases suppliers, re-plans schedules and checks whether work was actually completed. Idle work is nudged and escalated up the reporting line, and jobs close on proof such as a photo rather than a reply.
The J4S test that sold the idea
An early commercial deployment ran at J4S, a glass manufacturing facility with 120 employees. Morsa was plugged into the plant’s existing ERP software and its operational WhatsApp groups, with no new app for workers to learn.
Over four weeks, the system tracked about 900 operational commitments. The share of tasks completed on time rose from 30% to 75%, according to the company.
“Our people don’t have to learn any new software. People just message the way they always have. Morsa coordinates all the messages in the background.”
Anil Kohli, Production Head, J4S
Morsa says it now works across several plants, supporting 212 people in 75 operational group chats, including at a Tier-1 automotive supplier it has not named.
Two very young founders
Morsa was founded in June 2026 by Satvik Kapoor, 22, and Vedant Singh, 19. Kapoor is chief executive and Singh is chief technology officer. The pair met on Tech Twitter and won first place together at a Y Combinator hackathon in San Francisco.
Kapoor graduated in computer science from the University of Michigan in 2026. He previously worked at Amazon, Perplexity and Y Combinator-backed startups, and ran US sales and operations for his family’s manufacturing business while at university.
Singh is from Lucknow and began programming at 13. During the COVID-19 pandemic he built a hospital-bed availability platform that served more than 500,000 users, and he has won about 11 hackathons since moving to the US.
“I grew up around my family’s factories and have worked across eight of them, and the limit is never the machines. It’s how fast a plant can decide and act,”
Satvik Kapoor, Co-founder and CEO, Morsa
“The next breakthrough is not going to be about smarter AI models. It is about building the infrastructure that lets agents understand the state of an entire factory, make decisions, execute them, and learn to run the factory themselves,”
Vedant Singh, Co-founder and CTO, Morsa
Why factories are the next stop for AI agents
Most factory software asks workers to change how they work, and most of them do not. Morsa bets the opposite way, meeting teams inside WhatsApp groups they already live in and doing the coordination quietly in the background.
Silicon Valley backing for a Delhi team founded five months ago is itself a signal. Investors are looking beyond chat demos toward agents that run real operations, and a factory floor is about as real as operations get.
The test now is scale. A four-week pilot at one glass plant is a strong start, but holding the 75% on-time rate across many plants, suppliers and shifts is the result that will decide whether the AI COO idea lasts.
