VDT builds the robots that travel inside pipelines looking for the flaw that will burst
The Noida-based company makes inline inspection tools that run through oil and gas pipelines, measuring their shape and detecting metal loss, in a category India has long imported.
A buried pipeline cannot be looked at. It runs for hundreds of kilometres underground or underwater, carrying something flammable under pressure, and somewhere along its length sits the flaw, a patch of corrosion or a dent, that nobody can see and that will eventually cause it to fail.
The industry's answer is to send a machine through the inside. Known as pigs, these tools are launched into the pipeline and pushed along by the flow of the product itself, recording as they travel. A geometry tool measures the shape of the pipe, finding dents and ovality. A magnetic flux leakage tool magnetises the wall and detects where metal has been lost to corrosion.
These tools have almost always been imported, and was established in Noida in August 2017 to build them in India. It is led by Bhuvanesh Sharma as managing director, and describes itself as an integrated engineering, project management and field services company for the oil, gas and energy sector.
Inside the pipe
VDT Pipeline says its team developed India's first patented geometry inspection tool, and has since built a magnetic flux leakage tool. Around the tools sits a wider services business. It lists intelligent pigging, hot tapping, which is making a connection to a live pipeline without shutting it down, baseline surveys, risk-based inspection, asset integrity management, metal magnetic memory testing and acoustic inspection, along with CNC and vertical machining.
That range reflects how the industry buys. An operator wanting a pipeline to be inspected does not usually want to buy a tool. It wants a company to arrive, run the inspection, and hand over a report on what the pipe looks like inside and what needs attention first.
The commercial argument for doing it domestically is straightforward. Foreign inspection contractors bring equipment into the country for a campaign and take it away again, which sets both the price and the schedule. India has tens of thousands of kilometres of oil, gas and product pipelines, and the network is still growing.
A minister's award, and an oil major's fund
The company’s backing has come through institutional channels. It has raised a seed round from the Enterprise Incubation Centre at IIM Lucknow, with the amount undisclosed, and appears in the portfolio of ONGC's Rs 100 crore startup fund, the state oil company's vehicle for backing ventures in its own supply chain.
In June 2026, it was among the Indian companies taken to Nice, France, for Bharat Innovates, where it presented its inline inspection platform to industrial and energy buyers and described itself as offering pipeline inspection at scale.
What the company has not published is a customer, a contract value, a revenue figure or the number of kilometres it has inspected.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)