Today is a bit off-track from our usual hardware/software updates, but it’s a necessary detour.

About me and how we started?

I have been a computer geek/nerd all my life, from building and publishing webpages on tripod.com in 4th grad (~2000s) to running Knoppix Live CD in 7th grade and then starting a tech forum in 10th grade - in parallel to things like soldering, assembling computers. I think a lot of folks who grew up around this time share similar stories. I did my graduation in computer science and drifted more to software than hardware, and while I was still at uni, I built commercial projects for customers, things like websites, desktop software and later even mobile apps. After uni, I continued doing this but with a more formal execution and ran a software development shop and did some consulting.

Early in 2020, we were working on a project with a large energy conglomerate, and we struggled to deploy a streaming hardware in their premises that used 2 Python scripts. We came up with a 3D printed assembly with a Pi inside and a battery from a power bank. I kept joking with my team on why this is so hard - while we manage to deploy VMs in remote datacenter within seconds now.

Now, during COVID, I got to a point that I didn't want to continue my consulting/development work and decided to pursue something of my own - building the small deployable computer that we didn't have back then was at the top of my list. More of a bet at the time because we didn't have any clue about building hardware. Most of the first year I spent was assembling the right folks and planning how to execute.

While we set out to make a small streaming computer, later during the process, we realised that there is a bigger gap here, and we organically kept building upwards. These are the kind of capabilities we had thought of back in Oct 2021. I find it amusing now that so much of it was already pinned on our idea board back then.

Early versions of the Comet

Recently at the IndiaFOSS 2025 conference I spoke about how iterations work in hardware, and part of the stuff I shared included how the Comet evolved over the past years. You can see how the form evolved over time.

How do we function?

We are close to 15 full-time team members, most of the core team have worked with me for the past 5-7 years and in most cases, their first job after school. Everyone in the core team has a different function that they take care of - these include PCB Design, CAD, Software, Supply Chain, and Extensions. Building something like the Comet requires a whole bunch of people with different skills. We follow a hybrid approach where some areas are covered by the core team, in other cases, we either work with external orgs, individual contributors or some very smart interns who love what we are building at Mecha. Also, why I call myself the orchestra's conductor. Most of our team is here on Discord and actively lurks around.

How do we fund the development?

Most of you would have wondered how we managed to fund this over time while we kept iterating. Building something like this is expensive, and at every stage we have used a different method to fund it. This is how we got by -

• When we started, I fueled in any savings I had in my previous consulting business to deliver the first revision; most of these funds were spent to convince ourselves that we could actually build this.
• Once we were confident and I had the designs of the first PCB ready, I reached out to my oldest customer and mentor of >10 years, and he agreed to get on board as an angel investor and provide us with the first pre-seed investment into Mecha - this was back in 2022.
• We managed to run this capital till early 2024. I continued to do some consulting on the side to help with the cash flow and fuel in any personal savings I had. Sometime in March 2024, we took an additional bridge round to help us build some publicity and interest towards the project before we started our crowdfunding. While we blew the entire cash in sponsoring events for booths and travel. Most of it didn't work out, but our biggest break happened at CES, which actually didn't cost us a lot of money in comparison.
• The other good thing that happened last year at IndiaFOSS 2024, we caught the eyes of folks from Rainmatter (https://rainmatter.com/), who are an investment fund of India's biggest stockbroking app - Zerodha. They are unconventional investors and evangelists for Open-Source. Zerodha also funds the FLOSS/fund (https://floss.fund/), one of the biggest private funds dedicated to open-source projects. The people behind Rainmatter/Zerodha are also the first folks ever to pre-order the Comet. They quickly got onboard and helped us plan our first seed investment round for Mecha.
• Earlier this year, I got a ping on Discord 😄 from the folks at Sunicon Ventures (https://sunicon.vc/,) - one of the partners himself being a Robotics Engineer, it didn't take time for him to understand what we were up to. They agreed to join the seed investment round, too.

I am quite vary of enshittification, so we wanted to pair ourselves with the right set of investors who see value in our open-source driven approach. I am happy to share that sometime in June this year we closed our first institutional round with Rainmatter leading the round and Sunicon Ventures participating. We are using this capital to get the Comet to production and also scale up development, operations to ensure we are able to deliver the kind of product that meets expectations.

Here is the podcast I recorded with folks from Sunicon Ventures talking about Mecha and building a hardware company from India.

Thats it for this update! Thank you for reading, and I cannot understate how important this community is to us, and how much gratitude we have for you in actively supporting us and helping us build a better product.

Here is our team at IndiaFOSS 2026, Bangalore