Aurm builds automated lockers and secure vault rooms inside gated communities, corporate campuses, and partner bank locations so customers can store valuables closer to where they live and work. The Bengaluru startup has raised ₹42 Cr ($4.4 Mn) in a Series A round led by Earth Fund and Sattva Ventures, with participation from angel investors. India still has a basic access problem in physical locker infrastructure, and Aurm is betting the answer isn’t another bank branch. It’s a distributed network of secure vaults. Founded in 2023 by Ganesh Balakrishnan and Vijay Arisetty, the company is trying to build an alternative to the old bank-locker model.
What do Aurm’s automated lockers actually do?
Here’s the simple version: Aurm lets a customer sign up through its app, complete KYC, choose a plan, set access priority, visit the vault, and retrieve the safe without depending on branch timings or staff intervention. Its app flow, as shown in the iOS listing, includes account creation and society onboarding. It also covers plan purchase, priority access, vault visits, and safe retrieval.
The physical setup is more than a row of lockers. Aurm builds reinforced steel-and-concrete strong rooms, usually inside residential clubhouses or similar shared spaces, and wraps them with active surveillance. Layered intrusion detection is part of the setup. The system monitors smoke, heat, vibration, and even seismic activity. The network is isolated with outbound-only monitoring and strict device whitelisting.
That changes the customer experience in an obvious way. Instead of waiting months for a bank locker that may be too far away and available only during banking hours, the user gets 24/7 access closer to home. Aurm’s facilities also come with insurance coverage of up to ₹25 lakh. In this category, safety is the whole product.
Aurm isn’t just selling security hardware. It’s selling convenience wrapped in compliance. Certain items are barred, and users go through KYC before access. The vaults are designed to run autonomously rather than as staff-heavy branches. It looks less like a premium amenity and more like a new kind of locker infrastructure.
Who founded Aurm and why are these automated lockers different?
The founding story
Aurm was started in 2023. The funding announcement identifies Ganesh Balakrishnan and Vijay Arisetty as the founders, while earlier reporting on the company’s launch also named Suraj HS and Pratap Chandana as part of the founding team. Later interviews identify Arisetty as CEO and Chandana as CTO. That suggests a broader founding bench than the short funding write-up captures.
The idea didn’t come out of nowhere. Arisetty has described his own frustration with getting a bank locker that was both available and conveniently located, and that experience shaped Aurm’s design choices. Closer access. Round-the-clock availability. No dependence on a branch manager. Balakrishnan framed the company early on as a response to the shortage of secure storage options for affluent Indians buying and holding physical valuables.
Why the founders have real market fit
Balakrishnan is best known as the cofounder of Flatheads, the sneaker startup he launched in 2018. Flatheads was later acquired by Styched in July 2023, which doesn’t make him a vault expert. But it does mean he’s already been through the startup build-sell-reset cycle once.
Arisetty is the more obvious category fit. Before Aurm, he cofounded MyGate in 2016 and helped build it into one of India’s biggest community-management platforms. MyGate now serves 27K+ societies and 5M+ residents, which matters because Aurm’s best distribution channel is exactly that kind of dense urban housing cluster. Arisetty also spent 10 years as an Indian Air Force helicopter pilot. He studied at ISB Hyderabad and worked at Goldman Sachs before becoming an entrepreneur.
That mix is unusually useful here. One founder has built a consumer brand. Another has deep access to the residential communities where Aurm wants to install vaults. The operating problem sits at the intersection of security, real estate, and urban convenience.
Early traction, fundraise, and what comes with it
Aurm had engaged more than 1,000 potential customers and multiple developers during early deployments before this round. The company is already live in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Visakhapatnam, which suggests the pilots have moved beyond slideware. The startup’s standard facility footprint is about 300 sq. ft. and can hold up to 300 lockers.
The company has also cut locker-infrastructure setup costs by about 25% so far. That matters because the model only works if Aurm can make distributed vault buildouts cheaper than the branch-heavy format it’s trying to replace. The new ₹42 Cr Series A is meant to speed up that rollout across residential complexes, corporate campuses, and bank branches.
Competition and market positioning
Aurm isn’t alone, but the category is still thin. MySafe India has launched a standalone automated safe-deposit facility in Gurugram with robotic systems and 24/7 biometric access, while banks such as ICICI have experimented with fully automated locker formats under products like Smart Vault. The source article also names Autovault as a rival targeting institutions and banks.
The difference is where Aurm wants to sit. MySafe looks more like a dedicated vault destination. Bank-run automated lockers still live inside bank infrastructure. Aurm is trying to wedge itself in between — inside the places people already frequent, with banks and developers as distribution partners. It shifts lockers from a branch product to a proximity product.
Why does Aurm’s ₹42 Cr round matter?
This round is really about distribution, not brand building.
Hardware businesses burn capital on deployment, compliance, monitoring, physical security, and site activation long before they look elegant on a spreadsheet. So when Aurm says it wants to expand across residential projects, office campuses, and bank branches, that’s not a vague growth line. It means vault construction and integrations. It also means approvals and a much wider ops footprint.
The investors also make sense for the shape of the business. In the funding announcement, Arisetty said, “This partnership allows us to leverage the deep domain expertise in the build environment and urban infrastructure of Earth Fund and Sattva Ventures.” That’s the clue here. Aurm doesn’t just need fintech-style adoption. It needs help getting inserted into buildings.
For customers, the upside is direct. If Aurm can turn pilots into repeatable rollouts, locker access becomes less dependent on legacy bank economics and more tied to where dense, affluent users already are. That’s a better fit for urban India than asking banks to treat lockers like a core profit center.
Why is India ready for automated lockers?
The demand side is hard to ignore. India held 34,600 tonnes of gold as of June 2025 and accounted for nearly 26% of global gold demand on a trailing four-quarter basis. This is still a country where families hold real physical value in jewelry and bullion, not just financial products on a screen.
The infrastructure side is changing too. RBI’s 2023 circular pushed banks to execute revised locker agreements by December 31, 2023, part of a wider tightening around how locker services are run and documented. That doesn’t create supply by itself. But it does show that locker access and liability became important enough to need regulatory attention.
Then there’s the urban form factor. RedSeer estimates that digitized community-management platform adoption in India could rise from about 25% — roughly 40K communities today — to more than 40%, or 70K+ communities, by FY2031. That’s a big deal for Aurm because its product works best when secure access, resident identity, and dense housing all sit in one place.
So the timing isn’t random. More wealth is being stored physically. More Indians are living in gated clusters. The places where Aurm wants to install vaults are becoming more software-managed, which makes embedded security infrastructure easier to sell and operate.
What to watch next for Aurm’s automated lockers
Aurm’s pitch is strong because it attacks a real inconvenience with a product people instantly understand. But this won’t be won by clever branding or a slick app alone. The real test is whether its automated lockers can keep utilization high enough and incident rates low enough. Partnerships also need to stay sticky enough to justify rolling this model city by city.
Better density matters.
Read how GobbleCube raised a $15M Series A led by Susquehanna Venture Capital to help consumer brands detect revenue leaks and unify sales, pricing, inventory, and media decisions with an AI-powered operating layer across ecommerce and quick-commerce channels.
FAQ
– What funding did Aurm raise?
Aurm raised ₹42 Cr, or about $4.4 Mn, in a Series A round. Earth Fund and Sattva Ventures led the round, and angel investors also participated. The money is meant to expand Aurm’s vault network across housing societies, office campuses, and bank-linked locations.
– How do Aurm’s automated lockers work?
Aurm’s customer flow starts in the app, where users can create an account, onboard their society, buy a plan, and schedule or prioritize access before visiting the vault. On the infrastructure side, the company combines a strong-room setup with sensors and surveillance. It also uses KYC checks and insurance-backed access rather than the old bank-counter model.
– Who founded Aurm?
Aurm was launched in 2023 by Ganesh Balakrishnan and Vijay Arisetty, according to the funding announcement. Earlier coverage of the startup’s formation also included Suraj HS and Pratap Chandana in the founding team, with Arisetty later identified as CEO and Chandana as CTO.
– Is Aurm a fintech company or a security infrastructure startup?
It sits in between, but security infrastructure is probably the cleaner label. Aurm works with banks and real estate developers, yet the core product is a physical network of secure vaults and safe deposit lockers placed inside high-density urban properties.
