Perceptyne: Building the Finance, Operations and Investor Backbone of a Robotics Startup
Perceptyne had three directors, big ambitions and no finance or operations infrastructure. SRF put a team inside its Hyderabad office and built it from the ground up.
Summary
- Perceptyne, a Hyderabad robotics company run by three directors, came to SRF in September 2024 with no inventory tracking, monthly-only accounting, no HR framework and slow, ad hoc answers to investors.
- SRF placed an embedded team in Perceptyne's office covering CFO services, FP&A, accounting and compliance, inventory, HR, investor relations and strategy, and designed an inventory process built for assembly rather than trading.
- Books now close daily, management information arrives on the 10th instead of the 15th, investor queries are acknowledged within two business days, and SRF has supported the company through its funding process.
The situation
Perceptyne builds robots for factory work. Its dual-arm systems are designed for tasks that need dexterity rather than strength, such as sub-assembly and inspection on automotive and electronics lines, and the company is headquartered in Hyderabad.
When it engaged SRF Capital Studio in September 2024, Perceptyne was an early-stage company with a large gap between its plans and its organisation. The management team was three directors. Engineering ambition was growing quickly, and the finance, operations and people processes a scaling company needs did not yet exist.
That gap carried real risk. Without processes, accountability depends on individuals remembering things, continuity depends on nobody leaving, and investors have to take the numbers on trust. For a deep-tech company that will need several rounds of funding, the last of these matters most.
What was missing
- Inventory. There was no tracking and no procedure for managing stock, which left gaps in accountability and exposed the company to losing assets without knowing it.
- Accounting. Books were written up once a month, so nobody had a current view of the financial position between closes.
- People. There was no formal hierarchy, no HR policies and no framework for hiring.
- Investors. Reports were put together when asked for, and answers to investor questions were slow to arrive.
- Coordination. Nobody inside the company was the single point of contact for advisors.
- Advice. An existing consultant handled transactions but offered little strategic depth.
- Expenses. Employees were paying business costs from their own pockets and claiming them back, which burdened both the staff and the company's cash planning.
- Systems. The software in use made real-time reporting hard and would not scale well.
One problem was specific to Perceptyne's business. A robotics company does not simply buy stock and sell it. It buys components and assembles them into products, so inventory moves through stages of work in progress. A standard trading-style inventory process would have missed most of what needed tracking.
What SRF did
SRF scoped the engagement across seven areas: CFO services and board-level advice, FP&A and MIS, daily accounting and statutory compliance, inventory process design, HR policy and hiring, investor relations, and strategy guidance on how the company should be structured to grow.
The work ran in three connected streams. The first stabilised financial and operational controls quickly. The second designed lasting processes for accounting, inventory and HR. The third built an investor relations function that answers questions before they become concerns.
An embedded team, on site
The defining choice was where SRF's people sat. Instead of advising from outside, SRF placed a resident team in Perceptyne's Hyderabad office, with a dedicated SRF point of contact working alongside the directors.
That removed the delays that come with external advisors: waiting for documents, waiting for answers, re-explaining context. It let the team work as part of the company, which matters when the job is building everyday processes. An adviser who sits in the office builds processes; one who visits writes reports about them.
An adviser who sits in the office builds processes; one who visits writes reports about them.
Diagnosis first
The engagement opened with a diagnostic review to find the most urgent gaps. By October and November 2024, SRF had designed and put in place an inventory SOP and an accounting SOP, and moved the books to a daily cycle.
The inventory SOP was built around assembly. SRF adapted standard frameworks to capture work-in-progress stock and the cost added at each assembly stage, so the company could account for components from receipt to finished robot.
Systems and payments
SRF introduced Zaggle, an expense management platform, so employees could make business payments through the company in real time instead of paying first and claiming later. That cut administrative work and made cash outflows easier to predict.
SRF also recommended moving from the legacy accounting tools to Zoho Books, a platform better suited to real-time reporting at Perceptyne's expected scale, and has supported that transition.
People and investors
SRF wrote HR policies, set up structured hiring procedures and defined an organisational hierarchy, giving a three-director company the structure to add people without confusion over roles.
For investors, SRF built a proper relations function, run from a tracker that logs each query through to its answer. From March 2026 SRF has also supported Perceptyne's funding process directly, with investor-facing financial and strategic work.
What changed
Perceptyne's finance and operations before and after the SRF engagement
| Area | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Accounting cycle | Monthly batch | Daily |
| MIS reports | Delivered on the 15th of each month | Delivered on the 10th, five days earlier |
| Investor queries | Ad hoc, with long delays | Acknowledged within 2 business days, tracked to resolution |
| Inventory | No tracking or procedures | Assembly-based SOP with end-to-end accountability |
| Employee expenses | Paid personally and reimbursed | Paid in real time through Zaggle |
| HR | No policies, hiring framework or hierarchy | Written policies, structured hiring, defined hierarchy |
Beyond those measures, statutory filings are now made on schedule, inventory can be accounted for from component to finished product, and FP&A and investor relations support continues as the engagement runs on.
Perceptyne's leadership described the quality and timeliness of the work as consistently high. They credited the embedded model with giving the company "operational depth" before it could realistically hire its own full team, and said the support on investor communication and financial infrastructure was central to presenting the company as investor-ready.
What this means for a founder or CFO in the same spot
Many Indian deep-tech companies reach this point: a strong technical team, early investors, and a back office that is one director's spreadsheet. The instinct is to wait until the next round and then hire a finance team. The cost of waiting is that the round itself will test processes that do not exist yet.
- Get the books daily before you need them to be. Monthly accounting is fine for a stable business. A company raising money or building inventory needs to know its position this week.
- Design inventory for how you actually make things. If you assemble, your stock sits in work in progress for long stretches. A trading-style process will understate what you hold and what it cost.
- Treat investor questions as a service level. A tracker and a fixed acknowledgement time costs little and changes how investors read the company. Slow answers read as disorder, whatever the cause.
- Stop staff funding the business. Advance-and-reimburse is common in small companies and quietly expensive. Corporate payment tools fix it quickly.
- Consider embedded support before a full hire. A resident external team can build the processes a funded company needs while you are too small to hire each role, and hand over a working system when you are ready.
This is how our fractional CFO and FP&A teams work with early-stage companies, alongside HR business partnering and investor readiness support. For the sector context, read our report on robotics in Indian manufacturing, and on the finance discipline itself, what FP&A is.
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