GAIL’s Pankh Backs Fuel Aggregator Startup Nawgati

Gas refining public sector undertaking (PSU) GAIL (India) said on Thursday (January 4) that it had infused INR 1 Cr into fuel aggregator startup Nawgati via the PSU’s startup initiative, Pankh.

The startup plans to use the fresh capital to boost its technology and expansion.

The funding round comes just months after Nawgati secured an undisclosed sum in its seed funding round led by All In Capital. Before that, Nawgati raised an undisclosed amount from listed geotech unicorn MapmyIndia in September 2022 at a valuation of $4 Mn.

The company further plans on onboarding over 2,000 fuel stations onto its retail operations platform, Aaveg, a vertical SaaS offering that allows fueling stations access to real-time information on transit time, waiting time, serving time, and attendants deployed.

The startup’s other offering, the Nawgati Fuelling App, allows consumers to check on fuel rates, availability, and wait/serve time of stations in their vicinity.

Founded by Vaibhav Kaushik, Aalaap Nair and Aryan Sisodia in 2019, Nawgati builds congestion management and compliance monitoring systems for fuel stations, helping fuel stations manage traffic and avoid congestion.

Besides backing from Pankh from GAIL, Nawgati is incubated and supported by BITS Pilani’s incubator PIED Society, and the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY).

Kaushik said that the collaboration with GAIL will also help in improving consumer convenience. 

For the uninitiated, GAIL’s Pankh invests in startups across spaces such as natural gas, petrochemicals, energy, project management, logistics and electric mobility. The petrochemical PSU had set aside a corpus of $7.7 Mn (INR 50 Cr) to help startup entrepreneurs. Since then, it has invested an undisclosed seed funding in freight and truck matching startup TruckSuvidha in 2019.

The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), another PSU under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas like GAIL, also launched an INR 100 Cr startup fund in 2016 to invest in startups working in the oil and gas sector. The PSU has since invested INR 2 Cr in Chakr Innovation, a cleantech startup which converts vehicle emissions into printable ink, in 2021.

The trio of founders also appeared in the second season of Shark Tank India last year They were able to bag INR 67 lakhs for 3% equity combined from bOAt’s Aman Gupta and CarDekho’s Amit Jain.