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Cumbersome traffic on Indian roads, a headache for drivers, is a challenge a fleet safety solution start-up, Netradyne has taken up to offer a solution.
Netradyne, a California and Bengaluru-based start-up launched by Avneesh Agrawal and David Julian which last week received $150 million from a clutch of investors including SoftBank wants to deploy its solution to help enterprise-class fleet owners in India, who transport goods for e-commerce companies, among others. Amazon in the US already has a tie-up with Netradyne for its delivery vehicles to monitor the behaviour of drivers as they deliver packages. The company’s flagship product, Driveri is an AI-powered fleet safety system that can assess and alert drivers on factors such as speed, traffic sign compliance, and distracted driving, among other functions. The start-up’s CEO Agrawal told BusinessLine that Driveri has a limited feature set in India. This is a result of cultural reasons such as drivers not following the traffic rules and some even not practising safe driving behaviour. For one, the traffic sign compliance feature of Driveri is not commercially implemented in India. However, other features such as distance between vehicles, collision warning, and driver tracking are be available across both American and Indian markets.
Road safety
The company claims to have about 1,000 customers, out of which the majority of clients are in the US. Some of its clients in India include Zoomcar and Shell.
“We would like to get more sophisticated in India, even though it’s been a pickle. As humans, we have a sense of what is safe and what is unsafe. There are rules for safe driving in India, but I don’t know if drivers really think about the rules while driving. And so we are doing a lot of learning in India and that’s one of the areas we’re going to expand into,” said Agrawal.
Netradyne said teh system is able to give constant feedback to the driver, record and analyse their driving style at low internet bandwidth. And later uploads the collected data to the cloud when it gets better connectivity. “It helps if connectivity is better but it doesn’t restrict us in any way,” Agrawal added.
A 200-member team is based at its Bengaluru R&D centre and the number is projected to double in next year. Most of the software and hardware development of Driveri was done in India.
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