2026-07-05 · Company note
Why every claim on this site carries a status badge
If you have clicked around this site, you have seen three small labels everywhere: Field-Proven, In Development, and Roadmap. They are not decoration. They are the most important design decision on the site.
The audience checks
Sarthi sells to mine engineers and applies to research funders. Both audiences share a professional habit: they verify. A ground-control engineer will ask where exactly the robot has operated. A grant reviewer will look up the publications. A diligence analyst will compare the website's claims from six months ago against what shipped.
Robotics as an industry has trained these audiences to discount what they read. Too many demo videos were teleoperated. Too many "autonomous" systems had a pilot in a container nearby. We would rather be the company whose smallest claim survives a hostile check than the one with the most impressive page.
What the badges mean, precisely
- Field-Proven means it has already happened in a real environment and is documented: the kilometer of Icelandic lava tube, the post-collapse mapping in an operating mine, the years of underground trials. Published research stands behind each one.
- In Development means we are building it now and it gates our own MVP schedule: the automated report pipeline, scheduled unattended missions, change detection on registered scans. You can see the same schedule we run the company on, on the proof page.
- Roadmap means we intend it, we have reasons to believe it, and it does not exist yet. The aerial void-inspection mission and three of our four industry pages carry this tag today.
The uncomfortable part is the point
Publishing "In Development" on your own product page feels wrong to every marketing instinct. It is also the only honest description of a pre-seed company, and it converts the right people: an engineer who trusts our labels brings us underground sooner, and a reviewer who trusts our labels reads the rest of the application differently.
When a badge on this site changes from In Development to Field-Proven, it will be because a mission ran and a report landed, and we will write about it here.