Vivek Vishwakarma24 Aug 2026
13:36IST
New Update
WATER, a Physical AI startup building adaptive intelligent surfaces, today announced a $2.5 million funding round led by Endiya Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on deep tech, enterprise AI, and healthcare and life sciences.
The round saw participation from Pullela Gopichand (Chief National Badminton Coach, India), Rohit Chennamaneni (Co-Founder, Darwinbox) and Nandan Reddy (Co-Founder, Swiggy), among other angel investors.
The startup is developing adaptive surfaces designed to respond to how people sit and sleep. Its two products, FLOW, an adaptive chair, and CAMA, an adaptive bed, are powered by a shared foundational model called VORTEX, which is designed to sense and respond to the human body in real time.
FLOW focuses on posture, movement and load during seated interaction, while CAMA focuses on sleep, recovery and respiration. Together, the products are aimed at applying real-time sensing and adaptive technology to everyday seating and sleeping environments.
The startup said that while connected furniture and sleep-tracking products have become more common, many primarily focus on sensing or offer limited physical response. WATER’s approach combines sensing, decision-making and closed-loop physical actuation across multiple surfaces through an underlying model.
“Our thesis is simple: intelligence in the physical world should upgrade the human being at the center of it,” said Teja Vinukollu, Founder and CEO of WATER.
“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. FLOW and CAMA are step one on the road to a world where every human being gets to be superhuman.”
“WATER represents exactly the kind of category-defining bet we look for,” said Sateesh Andra, Managing Partner at Endiya Partners.
“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. What excites us most is where this can go: the same intelligence that understands a person in a chair or a bed could eventually extend to entire adaptive environments, spaces that respond to people rather than the other way around. The team has shown real capital efficiency and real technical depth in getting here, and we’re excited to back them as they take this further.”
The startup will use the raised capital to support its continued technical validation, including proving how its model’s understanding transfers across products and users.
