Daybreak - Indian robotic-toys maker Miko is running where Silicon Valley ones stumbled

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

The consumer-robotics graveyard is littered with well-funded American startups. Moxie, Jibo, Anki—all raised millions, then collapsed under cloud costs and thin margins. Enter Miko, a Mumbai company selling AI companions to American kids. With Indian manufacturing cutting costs to one-fifth of US production and subscriptions driving recurring revenue, Miko has advantages its rivals never had. Yet it's still losing money—120 crore rupees last year. Now, as the company hits 500,000 units in annual sales, it's reaching the exact scale where others stumbled. Can Miko's India edge break the robotics curse, or will it become just another cautionary tale?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Six-year-old Alicia is staring at a small robot's animated screen.

She takes a beat before she asks, Hey, Miko, why is the sky blue? Within seconds, this robot launches a little. into an explanation about light wavelengths and atmospheric scattering. Before it's finished, Alicia has another question. Then another. And another. Ever since her California-based parents bought her the Miko 3 a few years ago,

this has become Alicia's daily routine. Miko is an AI-powered drawboard companion. It's basically a little tablet on wheels with cartoon eyes. In the US, it sells for $200. In India for about $15,000 It can do math, teach exercises, play hide and seek, and it can even get kids into bed by 10pm.

It sounds like every busy parents dream helper because the device is always around and every little thing from spellings to breakfast menus now goes through Miko first. But then the concern that haunts every parent became a reality. Alicia was growing dependent, to a degree that made her mother intervene

because she had to restore some sort of balance to her child's relationship with technology. And this delicate balance between educational supplement and digital dependency is precisely the tightrope that Miko walks every day. This 10-year-old Mumbai company is currently valued at more than $500 million. It raised $80 million from investors

like Stride Ventures and Ivy Cap Ventures. The company manufactures consumer robots in India for customers mostly based in the US and other countries. Its two main products are Miko Mini and Miko 3, which are targeted towards children aged 5 to 10. Last year, Miko sold more than half a million units and sales are consistently growing at 40% every year. In 2024, Miko reported an almost 60% jump,

company revenue, reaching more than 300 crore rupees, which was an incredible achievement in comparison to its U.S. competitors, all of which have shut down within the last two to three years, even after raising or reaching revenue of about $100 million. They failed because they couldn't keep up with cloud costs, heavy competition, expensive U.S. operations, and the lack of recurring revenue. In this $8 billion global market, which sets, While social robots, these companies were heavily losing money. When eventually funding dried up, they died as well. But now comes the biggest season for toy sales.

Nearly 80% of all toys in the US are sold during Christmas. And Miko's robots have the chance to prove that they can succeed where American robotics have struggled. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Rachel Virgis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Niktha Sharma and I, will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Friday, the 19th of December.

The idea for Miko was born a decade ago in Mumbai when co-founder Snei Vaswani and his partners came across a frustrated mother with a five-year-old who was addicted to TV screens. They instantly knew they had to solve this problem. Vaswani said that they realized that it should be the parent who needs to be in the driving seat. and investors were instantly hooked to the idea as well. One investor from Inflexer ventures explained the appeal to my colleague

the Ken reporter DVLS Pranati. See, parents often try to limit screen time but kids don't always respond. So Vaswani came up with a solution. If you can't eliminate screens, why not make screen time educational? This plan has worked for Miko. While Silicon Valley toy makers have left behind

thousands of expensive robot toys and about as many heartbroken children, Miko has somehow survived. It has sold 700,000 units in total. And in November, it raised over $10 million from an American audio company called I Heart Media. Now, Miko owes a lot of its success to the fact that Vaswani and his partners weren't in a rush. Miko took almost two and a half years to launch. It ran more than 20 pilots with nearly 50,000 kids before finally launching in 2016. This plan gave Miko enough time to see the big picture. You see, several robotics companies were going bust. Take Moxie, an AI-powered robot by US company Embodied Inc, which went dark in 2024 after

four years of operations. It couldn't keep up with the cloud storage costs, which was crucial for its AI conversation feature. A few years before that, Ankiy. another US robotics company went bankrupt. It was approaching a hundred million dollars in revenue and it had sold over one million units of Cosmo, its miniature robot.

So Miko watched, learned and took a different approach. It wasn't going to depend solely on the cloud. And so it also decided to stream content from partners. And one thing it got really right was surprising. But rival robots cost over $500, dollars, Miko's toys cost less than half of that. Also, the company's in-house content team includes teachers, pediatric psychologists, and educators who help train the robot.

Activities like meditation and yoga are streamed through both AI-generated and pre-recorded partner videos. And the platform is open for developers to bring their own content. Miko also works with Indian publishers like Navnith, which means Miko functions like a TV with streaming educational content. Moxie, by contrast, was mainly built just for AI conversation. Now, as well as Miko's tech works, it's the core structure that actually came to its rescue. More on this in the next segment.

Miko's manufacturing base is in India, where labour costs much less. Vaswani told Pranati that when you make a product in the US, especially hardware, you burn literally $20 million before the product comes to life. Apparently, if you're building in India, you can do it much faster. Miko went from a whiteboard concept to all pilots in less than $1 million just by choosing to build in India. The company has units in Chennai, Mysuru and Gurugram. If Miko spends $5,000 to make a robot that sells for $25,000, it's looking at a pretty impressive gross margin of up to 20%. Manufacturing in India costs one-fifth of manufacturing in the US.

That's why a maid in US Moxie sold for $800 to $1,500. Miko's distribution strategy has also evolved quite carefully. Most toymakers first went to large retailers like Walmart and Costco. But Miko took nearly eight years to get there. Until then, it only sold through Amazon and its own portal. The thing is, Walmart and Costco give great visibility but at great cost. Convincing them for shelf space alongside the Legos and Matters of the World, which have been selling for over 40 years, cost significant money.

For every product sold through Costco and Walmart, makers pay nearly 60% as commission. Hamleys charges around 15,000 rupees commission for a robot priced at 25,000. Even on Amazon, storage fees run at $2.5 per cubic foot. Since Miko ships from India, shipping costs. also take 15% of the revenue. All this means many companies in this space lose money, including Miko. In fact, it reported a net loss of 120 crore rupees last year,

nearly a hundred crore increase from the year before. And so, here's where Vaswani hopes to change things with a subscription model. Miko Max was launched in 2021. It provides content from Disney, Paramount, Eyeheart Media and other premium providers. That's over 50,000 hours of content. With kids spending around 60 minutes daily on Miko, some parents don't even mind the $100 annual price. Vaswani told us that at any point,

literally 40 to 50% of people who buy end up subscribing. The company claims to have made almost 30 crore rupees from subscriptions alone in the last fiscal year. Subscriptions now contribute 15 to 20% of total revenue. It's been their fastest growing vertical, and as Vaswani tells us, growing faster than even hardware. See, without the subscription, Miko's robots have limited features. So, this hybrid model keeps recurring revenue while ensuring that customers don't end up with nothing if they stop subscribing. Stay tuned.

The holiday season is make or break for consumer robotics companies. With many competitors gone, Miko's job should be easier. But it's not such an easy sale, especially for an Indian company selling to a US audience. For instance, one parent in New York tested the robot's knowledge of American presidents. It couldn't come up with the right answer to who the country's 47 president was. Also, with younger children and those with speech impediments, Niko really struggles with voice recognition. A parent told us that their child is about three years old, a little younger than recommended. And even though the child speaks fairly well for his age,

Miko has a hard time registering anything he said. The parent was worried that any kid without clear diction would struggle to engage with a robot. Despite this, Miko is selling nearly 500,000 units a year. And now it's heading straight to the point where every other player has stumbled. For instance, Anki was approaching a breakthrough when it shut down. Sferro, another American robotics firm, had sold more than 3 million units before abandoning the consumer market.

And it's not clear that subscriptions alone can save Miko, because they aren't exactly a brand new concept. Take Moxie. It had a $40 subscription plan on top of its $800 price tag. Obviously, it didn't really work out for them. Because ultimately, subscriptions aren't a magic wand. An analyst who tracks consumer goods said that if hardware sales slow down, subscription revenue by itself wouldn't be able to sustain operations at the current scale. So the next few years will tell whether Miko's advantages are enough. India costs, subscription revenue and a lack of crippling cloud dependence. Are these ingredients enough to break the robotic stoikers that has plagued all its competitors?

For now, as Christmas approaches and American children tear open packages, some will find a little robot with cartoon eyes staring back at them. And whether Miko becomes the exception or just another cautionary tale in the robotics graveyard remains to be seen. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings, A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.