Image credit: Pace Robotics
Paint a wall, and the result depends on the wrist behind the roller — the pressure, the overlap, the day the painter is having. On a large construction site, multiply that variance by thousands of square feet and hundreds of workers, and wall finishing becomes one of the least predictable, most rework-prone parts of the build. A Bengaluru startup decided to hand the roller to a machine instead.
The company is Pace Robotics, founded in 2020 by Ayushmoy Roy and Srinivas K Pai, and incubated at SINE, IIT Bombay. Its flagship product, the Centa Painter, is an autonomous, multi-tasking robot for building finishes: it applies putty, sands, primes and paints walls and ceilings, one machine doing the work of an entire finishing crew. The company claims it works at up to ten times the speed of conventional manual methods, with up to 80% less manpower and up to 3x cost savings — while holding consistent quality.
One robot, four finishing trades
Centa Painter is built around a modular platform: the same robot switches between putty application, sanding, primer and painting rather than being a single-purpose machine. According to the company, the robot perceives its surroundings, identifies work surfaces and obstacles, and dynamically plans its work — adapting to the site rather than demanding a pre-scanned, perfectly prepared environment. That matters because, unlike a factory floor, a construction site changes every day: surfaces vary, scaffolding moves, and materials pile up in the robot’s path.
The Centa Painter was fully conceptualised, designed and developed in India, the company says, after more than four years of R&D, on-site trials and pilots with leading developers and contractors. Pace describes it as the first and only multi-tasking robot for building finishes to be fully developed and commercialised in India.
From demos to repeat orders
Commercial deployment began in December 2025. Within six months, the company says it had built an order book of ₹5 crore from leading real estate developers, contractors and paint brands — and, more tellingly, repeat purchases. More than 20 developers and construction companies have evaluated the robot through live demonstrations, with several progressing to commercial discussions. Two Centa Painter units have been delivered to Sobha.
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“Companies are no longer coming only to see what a construction robot can do. They are evaluating where it fits into their projects, how it integrates with their existing workforce and what the operating model looks like,” said co-founder and CEO Srinivas Pai.
The milestone is significant because construction robotics in India must clear an unusually high bar: sites are unstructured, workflows are entrenched, and labour is among the cheapest in the world. A robot that only works in demonstrations never survives that arithmetic. Moving to sustained, paid deployment — and getting customers to buy again — is the real test, and it is one Pace appears to be passing.
The engineering bet
“Construction sites are dynamic and unstructured,” said co-founder and CTO Ayushmoy Roy. “We therefore built Centa Painter to perceive its surroundings, identify work surfaces and obstacles, and dynamically plan its work rather than depend on a pre-scanned or perfectly prepared environment.”
Pace Robotics counts Pidilite Industries among its investors — the adhesives and construction-chemicals major took a 19.5% equity stake in a 2021 seed round — alongside Sobha, IIMA Ventures, the MARL 5G Accelerator and Kochi Holdings. The alignment is deliberate: the companies that make the paint and the chemicals now have a stake in the machine that applies them.
Wall finishing will never be glamorous. But a machine that can putty, sand, prime and paint a ceiling without scaffolding, at machine consistency, on an Indian construction site — that is the kind of unglamorous engineering the country’s building boom has been waiting for.
