In most factories, quality still depends on a person walking to a machine, drawing a sample, carrying it to a lab, waiting for a result, and then walking back to turn a valve. It is slow, it depends on scarce experts, and when the intervention comes late, the batch has already drifted — using more water, more chemicals and more energy than it needed to.
The company is Haber, a Pune company founded in 2017 by Vipin Raghavan, Priya Venkat and Arjunan PN, and its answer is to give the factory floor its own eyes and hands. Its flagship platform, eLIXA, sends robots to collect samples, measures them in real time, analyses what they mean, and intervenes on the spot — turning a round trip that once took hours into a decision made in minutes.
From sample to action, without the walk
eLIXA is built around a simple loop. Smart sensors and automated sampling gather live process data from across the plant. That data is analysed by AI models that have learned how each process behaves, and the platform then acts — adjusting chemical dosing and process settings in real time, instead of waiting for a lab report to travel back to the line. The company says the approach replaces manual, expert-dependent monitoring with continuous, closed-loop control, so quality stays steady and resources stop being spent on drift nobody spotted in time.
The platform works across the industries where process chemistry decides both quality and cost: pulp and paper, food and beverages, sugar mills and distilleries, breweries, mining and metals, and oil and gas. In paper mills, for example, eLIXA controls pulp brightness, microbial growth, foam and sizing; in other plants it manages cooling towers, water treatment and chemical dosing with the same loop of sample, sense, decide and act.
A platform that grows with the plant
Around eLIXA, Haber has built a wider manufacturing-intelligence suite. Mt. Fuji, launched in 2022, pulls historical data, live visualisations and digital twins into one view of yield, quality and cost, with predictive interventions on top. Kaiznn, its planning and optimisation engine from the same year, cuts trim loss and sharpens order fulfilment. Together, the company says, they move a manufacturer from reacting to problems after they happen to anticipating them before they cost a batch.
The numbers the company puts on its homepage tell the story it is proudest of: around 20% higher yield, around 25% lower raw-material use, and 29.8 million cubic metres of water saved. Its eLIXA pages add more: 15% yield improvement within six months, 35% less unplanned downtime a year, 25% fewer rejects, 50–60% fewer paper breaks, and deployment in six weeks with no disruption to production.
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Built in Pune, working far beyond it
Haber began in Pune, opened its first AI-driven Chemistry and Sensor Lab there in 2023, and expanded it into a larger Green Chemistry Lab in 2025. The company expanded across the Middle East in 2020 and opened offices in the United States and Canada in 2025, and its customer list includes industrial names such as ITC, the Aditya Birla Group and Tata Steel. Its team now numbers more than 200 experts, with more than 200 deployments behind it, and in 2025 Frost & Sullivan named Haber a Best Practices Recognition winner for Global Industrial AI Technology Innovation Leadership.
The backing has followed the same arc. Haber closed a $20 million Series B round in 2021 led by Ascent Capital, and raised $38 million in Series C funding in 2024 to fuel international growth and next-generation innovation, with Creaegis, BEENEXT and Accel among its investors.
What Haber is really selling is not a robot or a dashboard, but a factory that can look after itself — one that notices a drift while it is still small, corrects it while it is still cheap, and keeps its water, chemicals and energy for the product instead of the waste. For Indian manufacturing, that is a quiet kind of superpower, and it is being built in Pune.
Keep reading: No Tracks, No Magnets, No Shutdown: Inside Hachidori, the Bengaluru Company Teaching Robots to Find Their Own Way · The Robot That Learns Like a Baby: Inside CynLr, the Bengaluru Startup Teaching Machines to Handle Anything · More Industrial Automation & Technology stories
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