India’s water infrastructure suffers from a visibility problem:
“Every other piece of infrastructure gets measured. We meter electricity, we track traffic, we monitor the grid. But the pipes that carry our water and waste run underground, unmapped and unmonitored, and we only find out something is wrong when the street floods or the supply runs dry. You cannot fix what you cannot see.”
Cities lose 40–50% of treated water before it reaches consumers, while a significant share of wastewater never reaches treatment plants. As water scarcity intensifies and utilities face increasing pressure to reduce non-revenue water, monitoring and maintaining underground networks is becoming a strategic priority. We believe the next decade of innovation in water infrastructure will be driven not by treatment plants, but by the distribution networks where most losses occur.
Where does Solinas fit In?
The water network has two halves. The first is treatment—the water and sewage treatment plants that clean water at either end of the cycle. This is where the last two decades of investment went, and it is now a relatively mature and consolidated category.
The second half is distribution: the vast network of underground pipes that transports water to households and wastewater back for treatment. This is where most losses occur, where assets remain largely unmapped, and where existing technologies were never designed for Indian conditions. We believe the industry’s centre of gravity is now shifting decisively towards this layer, and that is exactly where Solinas operates.
“At its core, Solinas is building the Google Maps for underground water infrastructure: a digital system of record for assets that today remain largely unmapped, unmonitored, and invisible.”
Enter Solinas
Solinas is building a full-stack robotics and infrastructure-intelligence platform for underground water and sanitation networks. Rather than addressing a single point in the workflow, the company is building capabilities across three layers:
- Inspection through Endobot, a robotic crawler designed for the pipe sizes most common in India.
- Cleaning through HomoSEP, a robotic manhole and septic-tank cleaning system that eliminates hazardous manual intervention while helping utilities maintain critical sanitation infrastructure at scale, and through its upcoming horizontal cleaning robot.
- Infrastructure intelligence through SWASTH AI, which converts inspection data into condition reports, digital twins, and predictive maintenance insights.
As these products come together, Solinas is positioning itself to own the entire inspection-to-maintenance workflow rather than a single product category.
Why We Believe What We Believe
The strongest signal came from customer behaviour. Once a robot is deployed and infrastructure data starts accumulating, relationships tend to deepen across products, departments, and budgets. What begins as a single inspection engagement can expand into a broader, multi-product relationship over several years. We have already seen individual city accounts grow from pilots into multi-crore engagements, demonstrating both the scale of the problem and the expansion potential within a single customer.
What impressed us most was the distribution network this customer base demands. Success in municipal infrastructure requires more than technology; it requires local presence, continuity, and execution. Solinas has built a channel-partner network across nine priority states, supported by city-level service and business development teams. This distribution footprint provides market access and execution capability that would take years for a new entrant to replicate.
The founders were equally compelling. Divanshu Kumar has scaled Solinas from an IIT Madras research project into a commercial business with an unusual combination of ambition, commercial pragmatism, and financial discipline. He has already made the difficult transition from founder-led selling to a more scalable sales organisation. His co-founder, Moinak Banerjee, brings deep robotics and precision-engineering expertise from the European Space Agency and Scania, strengthening the company’s technical foundation.
Why Now, and Why It Fits Our Thesis
The macro backdrop has converged in a way it never has before. Government spending across programmes such as AMRUT, Jal Jeevan Mission, Namami Gange, and NAMASTE continues to grow, while multilateral institutions are deploying billions of dollars into Indian water infrastructure. The operating model of the sector is also changing. Under the emerging “one city, one operator” concession model, a single private operator is responsible for managing an entire city’s water network for 20–25 years. Unlike EPC contractors, whose economics are tied to building assets, these operators make money by running the network efficiently over decades, often on relatively thin margins. As a result, technologies that improve inspection, monitoring, and maintenance are shifting from discretionary purchases to core operational tools.
We also believe India’s advantage will come from building for verticals. Intermittent water supply, smaller pipe sizes, and largely unmapped networks create challenges that global solutions were not designed to solve. As a result, we believe the most defensible businesses will be those that own the hardware, software, proprietary data, and customer relationship together.
At Mela, we back deep-tech companies where technical depth meets commercial ambition at an inflection point. Solinas sits squarely at that intersection. As building gets easier, value will accrue to whoever owns the complete solution and the distribution to deliver it. Solinas has that head start. We see them building a category-defining company from India, with a clear path into the Middle East and South-East Asia, and we are excited to be part of the journey.
