Walk through a busy airport terminal, a hospital corridor or a factory floor late at night, and the gleaming floor beneath your feet may have been cleaned by nobody at all — or rather, by a robot that mapped the space, planned its own route and scrubbed every aisle while the building slept. That robot may well have been built in Pune. Peppermint Robotics designs and builds autonomous floor-cleaning robots that now work in more than 200 facilities across nine countries, and the company has just raised ₹100 crore to build more of them, closer to its customers around the world.
A robot that learns the floor
Every Peppermint robot runs on Peppermint OS, the company’s own software stack, built on hardware, software and perception systems it develops in-house. Computer vision and LiDAR map the space, plan cleaning routes and steer around obstacles, while a cloud dashboard lets customers watch their fleet in real time. For sites with strict information-security rules, the robots can also run fully offline. The company says its robots deliver 360° safety through dynamic detection and avoidance, using LiDAR, depth sensors and ultrasonic sensors — a sensor suite built for busy places where people, trolleys and forklifts share the floor.
The flagship SD45 is a fully autonomous scrubber-dryer built for large commercial and industrial spaces. The company says its lithium-ion power system delivers up to 8 hours of operating time on each charge, with a fast charger available for quicker turnarounds. It is built to last: a 100% stainless steel body, automotive-grade wiring harness and certification for industrial use, with spares dispatched within 48 hours anywhere in the world. The range around it covers the rest of the floor-care world — the compact SD20 scrubber, the VC20 industrial vacuum, the MOP20 mopping robot, a cleanroom scrubber, and an autonomous mobile robot for moving materials.
Built in Pune, working in nine countries
Peppermint Robotics was founded in 2019 by Runal Dahiwade, Nityanand Prabhutendolkar and Miraj C Vora, and incubated at SINE, the IIT Bombay incubator. The robots are assembled in Pune, and they now work in factories, hospitals, airports, malls, warehouses, hotels and universities — sold largely through facility-management companies that run cleaning operations for their clients. The company says its robots are running in more than 200 facilities, and its presence spans Asia, North America and Europe. It entered the United States in 2024, and the US has since become its largest market, ahead of India and western Europe.
Some of the toughest floors a cleaning machine can face are the ones Peppermint has already passed. The company says its cleanroom robots have cleared qualification testing in an EU GMP Grade cleanroom at a global pharmaceutical company — among the most tightly regulated environments a cleaning machine can work in. Its robots also keep the floors at GMR Airport in Hyderabad, helping it stay among India’s cleanest airports. The company says its revenue grew nearly sixfold between FY24 and FY26, after doubling the previous year — growth powered by machines that customers judge on one thing, as Dahiwade puts it: a clean floor, every shift.
The next factory is in North America
The new ₹100 crore pre-Series B round, led by pi Ventures and Crane Venture Partners with Asiana Fund participating, takes the company’s total funding to about ₹150 crore. The company says the primary capital will go into research and engineering for new robots, production infrastructure, tooling and capacity — and a new assembly line in North America, alongside its Pune facility, to bring production, service and customer support closer to its US customers. Business development in the US and Asia, a bigger presence in Europe, senior hiring and a next-generation cleanroom line complete the plan.
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Peppermint’s own film shows the SD45 at work in an airport:
Cleaning is the kind of work a building never notices until it stops — and that is exactly why it is worth automating well. A Pune-built robot that scrubs airport terminals through the night, holds its own in a pharmaceutical cleanroom and now heads for a second assembly line across the ocean is a quiet kind of industrial success: Indian hardware, Indian software, and floors the world can walk on.
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