2 decades back, Dipen Babariya and Mishal Jariwala have been on their way into a friend’s home in Surat. Google Maps suggested a different time-saving, shorter course. However, poor road conditions and inaccurate information meant it took the duo twice the time to attain their destination.
This pain point led the youth friends to contemplate developing a solution that supplied street and street-level data. Even the duo worked on road condition mapping applications in school for two decades and filed it as a job in the last year.
They won the very best project award and were shortly contacted by Surat Municipal Corporation for a pilot street assessment for the city to assist with street maintenance and city planning.
In 2019, this breakthrough caused the beginning of RoadMetrics, a profound technology startup on an assignment to map street and street data at scale.
The co-founders transferred into Bengaluru to shoot their vision forward. They also attended various technology conferences and startup meets in India’s Silicon Valley. At one event, they fulfilled Nikhil Prasad Maroli, a nearby and operations engineer in Texas A&M University, who’d returned in the US after working with Velodyne LiDAR and Tesla.
Together, the trio began working to create their vision a reality.
RoadMetrics is a AI-based alternative that uses image and sensor data accessed from a simple smartphone to classify street flaws, signs, traffic signals, streetlights, etc.. This street and street-level data helps enterprise mapping firms and smart city bodies with analytics on street networks and a much greater mapping expertise.
RoadMetrics was one of those nominees in RAISE 2020. RAISE, or ‘Responsible AI for Social Empowerment’, was a summit organised by NITI Aayog along with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
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How does RoadMetrics operate?
The startup utilizes smartphone and images sensor data to classify street flaws. The classification is accomplished by machine learning and also AI-based algorithms.
Nikhil states, “We use a marketplace platform to acquire crowdsourced data. The moment it’s uploaded into the cloud, our team processes it with our AI-based applications that defines various road/street resources and features. At this point, RoadMetrics has a coverage of over 2,500 kilometers in 3 cities, such as Bangalore, Surat, and Jamshedpur with over 100,000 image points obtained. ”
The data is sold through the API model as well as on a per km basis, which range from Rs 700 to Rs 1,500, depending upon the geography for Smart Cities.
RoadMetrics has finished a pilot project to JUSCO (Tata Group) in Jamshedpur and is currently in discussions with mapping/automotive firms like Mahindra for partnerships.
The primary target customers of RoadMetrics are mapping and automotive businesses and smart cities for intelligent alerts and warnings, ADAS systems, along with also analytics-driven road upkeep. The secondary target audience comprises location intelligence solutions for businesses according to road/street info.
Nikhil states RAISE 2020 gave the startup “a stage to showcase itself in the worldwide forum and engage with startups throughout classes ”. “We are delighted to become a winner one of 24 startups and receive exposure and guidance from the government. ”
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Challenges and the contest
Speaking about the significant challenges, Nikhil states training the program requires a huge number of data points that aren’t easily available for Indian streets. The company has tied up with a taxi fleet to get this data of over 2,500 kilometers for Bengaluru. He adds that much standardising operating procedures, such as light, R&D, and breaking, requires some time.
RoadMetrics sees itself as a data firm for street and street-level data. With more than 5.9 million kilometers of roads in India, unlocking this data with a crowdsourced marketplace solution is a huge opportunity.
While competitors such as Sweden-based Mapillary and US-based RoadBotics are in a position to penetrate the Western market, Nikhil states no participant is doing so in scale in India and the emerging markets.
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The way ahead
Last December, RoadMetrics increased a seed funding round from 100X. VC, and 3 angel rounds with non ISAFE notes. The company is currently equipped to scale the marketplace platform.
Nikhil says that the company aims to map all Tier I cities of India from July 2021 and target Tier II and III cities.
The RoadMetrics cellular app is similar to Google Maps/Waze. But the distinction is that significant road and street data is flanked from the marketplace platform used to crowdsource data so users are compensated for the data they acquire, either through direct payments per km or factors that could be redeemed for rewards.
By ancient 2021, the business plans to go into the HD mapping distance with the accession of LiDAR sensors that provide a whole 3D mapping option with centimetre-level precision.
HD mapping is a handy element for self-driving along with ADAS programs as well as a useful data repository for mapping businesses for higher precision road/street-level info.
RoadMetrics plans to concentrate on Bengaluru together with the available funding. “Our Series A funding will allow us to expand into other major metros in India with HD mapping,” Nikhil states.
Developed by Teja Lele Desai
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