The construction industry has a problem:
“Every large industry has had its automation moment. Manufacturing got it decades ago. Warehousing got it in the last ten years. Construction — a $750 billion industry in India alone, and one of the largest employers in the world is still waiting for its turn. The timing for this is ripe now.”
At Mela, we recently spent months in diligence talking to site managers, heads of plant and machinery, and general contractors across India and the Middle East. Every single conversation circled back to the same problem: labour is becoming harder to find, more expensive to retain, and increasingly unreliable. Government welfare schemes have pulled workers away from urban construction sites. Wages have spiked. Companies are no longer looking at automation as an arbitrage against labour costs; they now see it as a necessity for timely completion of projects by driving greater productivity while saving on costs. In an industry where labour accounts for 25–30% of total project costs, the pressure is significant.
India’s construction equipment industry is expected to reach $25 billion by 2031. However, this industry has seen very little innovation in how work gets done on-site. The machines have gotten bigger, but the workflows have stayed the same. Cranes, forklifts, and skid steer loaders move bulk material to the site — but the last mile, the movement of material within and across floors, is done manually. That gap has persisted for decades, and no category of equipment has emerged to specifically address it.
Enter Flo Mobility:
Flo Mobility is pioneering the application of Physical AI solutions to the construction industry, starting with what might be the most overlooked workflow in the industry: last-mile material movement. Every site, every day, moves bricks, cement, tools, and finishing materials from drop-off points to where the work happens; across floors, through hoists, along uneven terrain. It is repetitive, labour-intensive, and relevant across 75–80% of the construction project timeline. And until Flo, it was entirely manual.
Flo Mobility has built a solution designed from scratch for the chaos of a construction site. The company’s first product, the Flo Hauler, is a battery-powered Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) that navigates unstructured terrain, constantly changing layouts, extreme weather exposure, and multi-floor operations. The robot can carry loads of up to 1.5 tons, navigating both horizontally across job sites and vertically between floors, transporting heavy construction materials from storage areas to points of use.
Flo Mobility’s solution enables over 46% cost savings compared to manual processes, while delivering gross margins of around 50% for the company. Breakeven on each robot happens in less than a year, which is rare for automation vendors. The product is priced for an industry that operates on thin margins, and the Robot-as-a-Service model means customers can adopt without heavy upfront capital. In a sector where ROI drives every decision, this pricing-to-utility ratio has been a key enabler for early adoption.
Why we believe what we believe:
The strongest signal came from how customers behaved after the first deployment. We watched one of India’s largest infrastructure companies go from a two-robot pilot to deploying across multiple sites within a year. Other marquee contractors are now following the same pattern. They started with deployments on one or two sites with decentralised decision making and have since moved to centralised decision making with deployment across sites, making Flo a key part of their construction workflow.
“We also believe deeply in Flo’s platform approach. The same autonomy stack that powers material movement can be extended to tilling, screeding, wall finishing, painting, and other repetitive construction workflows. The immediate addressable opportunity across these workflows exceeds $65 billion globally. India alone has over 3,000 relevant construction sites active annually.”
What also stuck with us is the founders’ execution mindset – building an optimal solution that solves for the industry’s problem statement. They iterated through multiple product forms over two years before arriving at the right solution. There is value in their iterations as their deep customer insights, strong execution capability, and technical depth is what we believe will make them win in this market.
Why now, and how this fits our thesis:
At Mela, we back B2B deep tech companies where technical depth meets commercial ambition at an inflection point.
The labour shortage on construction sites has gone from a recurring complaint to a structural constraint. India’s infrastructure pipeline is at an all-time high, with record government capex across residential, commercial, and infrastructure segments — but the workforce to deliver on that pipeline is shrinking. At the same time, the underlying technology has caught up. Edge compute, sensors, and vision systems have dropped in cost to a point where autonomous robots can be priced for an industry that has not had the margins to absorb expensive automation. And most importantly, the buyers feel this as an urgent need. General contractors who would not have entertained a robotics–enabled automation conversation three years ago are now running pilots and embedding automation into their SOPs.
We also believe India’s edge will come from building for verticals; owning the hardware, technical depth on top of general-purpose platforms, the workflow, and the customer relationship (most importantly). There is significant momentum today around robotics foundation models; platforms building a universal brain that can control any robot for any task. We think these will be transformative. As foundation platforms mature, vertical players like Flo can leverage them to fast-track their own capabilities while retaining the moat that matters: domain expertise, proprietary deployment data, and years of earned trust on construction sites.
Distribution will become quite critical as building becomes easier. The value will accrue to whoever owns the complete solution. Flo Mobility has that head start. We see them building a global company from India, and we are excited to be part of the journey.
