Vahanalytics Rakes In $200K Seed Funding From Venture Catalysts

Vahanalytics – a Mumbai-based tech-driven startup, has raised $200K (INR 1.3 crore) in a seed funding round from Venture Catalysts. The investment was led by Vikram Lakhotia, managing director of Standard Transport Corporation, and Anirudh Damani, partner at Artha India Ventures.

The founders plan to utilise the raised funds for hiring talent and upgrading the servers for better analytics.

Launched in 2016 by Shivalik Sen, Arun Gandhi, Nikhil Tavora and Someshwar Dash, Vahanalytics is run by Urbtranz Technologies Pvt. Ltd. and is currently in closed beta stage. It aims to address the global problem of on-road transportation efficiency, on a local scale and make drivers and roads better through smarter data and machine learning.

Vahanalytics has created a low-cost, high-value product that can seamlessly collect information on key driver metrics and identify bad drivers from the good through scientific analysis. The platform captures real time data about driving habits and road conditions using smartphones, which is then processed and refined by leveraging the power of big data in order to extract useful insights.

Earlier this month, the founders sold their brand “Driven” to DriversKart in order to focus fully on Vahanalytics.

“India is currently the road accident capital of the world, and with urban transport witnessing a rapid growth, there was an urgent requirement for a smart solution that can aid in improving the extant road conditions,” said Anirudh.

Explaining the concept behind the development of the product, Shivalik said, “We started out as an on-demand driver service and built a driving analytics module to help track and train our drivers. While doing so, we realised that there was a distinct lack of a similar scientific metric to quantify and judge driving behaviour as well as to identify and train drivers in areas which require improvement.”

The startup is currently catering to logistics, cab aggregator and on-demand companies in this space, thereby helping companies in tracking drivers. They also keep a check on driving behaviour, suggest ways to improve them and help lower the maintenance costs.

“The market opportunity is huge, considering that logistics space in India is valued at $220 Bn. These type of startups already exist in the US and Canada, and will enter India pretty soon. So, we are basically doing it the first here,” said Shivalik.

However, he says that quality of hardware and network connection in India are the major roadblocks in the success path. “Not on all roads we have cell phone or internet connectivity. We are trying to overcome that by making our systems independent of internet connectivity,” he added.

Venture Catalysts has earlier invested in startups such as vPhrase Analytics, Siftr Lab ($150K), ConfirmTKT ($250K) and LenDenClub.