Built on Ground Truth: How Six Years in the Field Became a Platform

Why I Started

My background was investment banking at PwC first and later - KPMG. I understood how large organisations make capital decisions, how plant managers justify maintenance spend to boards, how risk lives in spreadsheets long after it has stopped living in spreadsheets and moved into corroding steel.

When I founded Volar Alta on 18 February 2020, just weeks before the world shut down, I was motivated by a gap I had observed across boardrooms and plant floors alike: heavy industry had enormous physical assets and almost no systematic way to understand what was happening to them over time. Inspections were episodic. Memory was human. Decisions about risk were made on intuition, experience, and occasionally luck.

Drones and robots offered a way to see more, more safely. We started there. But even in those earliest deployments, I understood that seeing was only the beginning. This is the story of how Volar Alta Private Limited grew from a robotics field service provider into an industrial AI software company, and why that pivot was not a change in direction but an inevitable deepening of the same original purpose.

Six Years of Ground Truth

Between 2020 and today, our teams have deployed across more than 50 plants in cement, steel, power, oil and gas, and heavy engineering. We have worked with clients including Adani, JSW, Vedanta, Dalmia, Nuvoco, Maruti Suzuki, TÜV SÜD etc. We have sent robots into cooling towers, flare stacks & storage tanks - across structures where a human inspector would have required a full scaffold build costing days of shutdown.

Every inspection we ran produced data. What we slowly realised was that we were sitting on something far more valuable than inspection reports. We were building the datasets for industrial asset degradation: accumulated across 1,000+ assets, over six years of deployments.

This is ground truth, collected the hard way, by being present alongside our users.

The Moment the Pivot Became Inevitable

For the first few years, we were excellent at delivering inspection services. Our clients trusted us. Our data quality was high. But I kept returning to the same frustration: our value was arriving as a PDF report, once a year, sometimes twice. The insights were real. The delivery format was broken.

Plant engineers do not need an annual inspection report. They need a system that remembers everything ever observed about an asset, tracks how its condition is changing over time, surfaces the right risk signals at the right moment, and connects those signals to financial consequence. They need intelligence that compounds.

We were not a drone services company that happened to produce data. We were an industrial AI company that had been building its training dataset in the field, one inspection at a time.

So we stopped defining ourselves by the hardware and started defining ourselves by what we know. Volar Alta today is a hardware-agnostic industrial AI platform. We can ingest data from any robotic source: drones, crawlers, climbing robots, ROVs. What we provide is not inspection footage. It is a continuous, compounding intelligence layer built on our proprietary modules.

The Harder Truth About Pivoting

Pivoting sounds clean when you write it in a blog post. In practice it meant honest conversations with clients who had come to us for a service, about why we were asking them to think of us differently. It meant rebuilding our positioning, pricing architecture, go-to-market approach, and internal team structures, simultaneously.

It also meant sitting with the discomfort of being further from revenue certainty for a period, in service of a larger ambition. I did not take that lightly. I took it seriously because I had seen, across 50 plants, exactly how much value was being left on the table when industrial AI was deployed shallowly.

The only courageous thing about this pivot was deciding to trust what six years of field work had taught us over what the market expected us to be.

Where We Are Going

Today, Volar Alta is entering its next chapter. We are helping asset-heavy organisations to understand exactly where they are on the journey from reactive maintenance to predictive intelligence, and create an implementation roadmap. We are deepening our partnerships for Indian and European markets.

The company we are building is one where a plant manager anywhere in the world can look at any asset in their portfolio and know, in real time, what its condition is, how it is trending, what the risk exposure is, and what it will cost if they act now versus if they wait.

We continue to build it from the ground up. Literally.

Ground truth is not a tagline. It is a place - inside this boiler!

July 2024 / Chandrapur / Power Plant

Volar Alta Private Limited is an award-winning industrial AI company, recognised among India's Top 3 at the AI by HER Global Impact Challenge at the IndiaAI Impact Summit 2026, part of NVIDIA Inception, and internationally incubated at HEC Paris and Station F - France.