Hyderabad-Based WATER Bags $2.5M to Build 'Bio Physical Intelligence'

WATER, a Hyderabad-based physical AI company, has raised $2.5 million in a round led by Endiya Partners to build its adaptive-surface technology. 

The round also saw participation from Pullela Gopichand, Chief National Badminton Coach of India; Rohit Chennamaneni, Co-founder of Darwinbox; and Nandan Reddy, Co-founder of Swiggy, among other angel investors.

The company will use the funding to support technical validation of VORTEX, its foundational model designed to sense, understand, and respond to the human body in real-time.

“Our thesis is simple: intelligence in the physical world should upgrade the human being at the centre of it,” Teja Vinukollu, Founder and CEO of WATER, said in a statement. “We call that layer Bio Physical Intelligence. The body is constantly telling the surfaces it lives on what it needs, and VORTEX is the first model built to listen and respond.”

Founded in 2024 by Teja Vinukollu and Haneesh Mourya Desu, WATER has developed VORTEX as the shared foundational model behind its two products—FLOW, an adaptive chair, and CAMA, an adaptive bed. FLOW focuses on posture, movement, and load during seated interaction, while CAMA focuses on sleep, recovery, and respiration.

The company said its approach combines sensing, decision-making and closed-loop physical actuation across multiple surfaces. VORTEX is engineered as a closed loop that can sense, model, actuate, and learn as it interacts with the human body.

WATER has already built a near-production-ready adaptive sleep system that was showcased at CES 2026. The company also said a foundational patent filing underpins its approach to safety for systems designed to act on the human body without disturbing it.

The company's longer-term vision is to extend its body-intelligence layer beyond individual products to adaptive environments. WATER said seating, sleep surfaces, and other physical systems could eventually respond dynamically to a person's needs, with potential applications extending into automotive and aviation.

“This isn’t a smarter chair or a smarter bed. It’s a genuine attempt to build a foundational model of how the human body interacts with the surfaces it lives on, and that’s a much bigger and more durable idea,” said Sateesh Andra, Managing Partner at Endiya Partners.