Prominent VCats angels Vikram Lakhotia and Anirudh Damani lead the investment
New Delhi, May 30, 2016: Vahanalytics, a tech-driven startup aimed at making Indian roads safer and better has raised $200 USD through Venture Catalysts, India’s first Seed Investment & Innovation Platform. The investment was led by prominent VCats angels Vikram Lakhotia and Anirudh Damani. With driverless smart cars increasingly being explored as a viable medium to improve the on-road transportation efficiency by tech giants around the world, the investment into Vahanalytics is aimed at addressing a global problem on a local scale.
Speaking on the investment, Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder, Venture Catalysts, said, “Data analytics in transportation using telematics is the need of the hour. The space is extremely exciting and opens the door for almost limitless possibilities for implementation. The decision to invest into Vahanalytics was taken due to its strong founding team, its vision and its potential to create an excellent product.”
Explaining the concept behind the development of the product, Shivalik Sen, Co-founder, Vahanalytics, 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. Seeing how this tool could have a number of use-cases across industries such as transportation, logistics and insurance, we spoke to several businesses and received an overwhelming response for the idea. This was what made us go all in with VA.”
Launched in 2016 by Shivalik Sen, Arun Gandhi, Nikhil Tavora and Someshwar Dash, Vahanalytics aims to make drivers and roads better through smarter data and machine learning. 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.
Vikram Lakhotia, Managing Director – Standard Transport Corporation, added, “Having been associated with the logistics industry, I see how such a development can bring in major disruption in several market segments. Vahanalytics’ solutions address a major industry pain point by improving both fuel efficiency and road condition monitoring through smart technology and data analytics.”
Anirudh Damani, Partner – Artha India Ventures, said, “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. 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. We have complete faith in Vahanalytics and their approach to analyse how proficient the person in the driving seat realistically is.”
The funding into Vahanalytics is another in a long line of seed investments which have recently been facilitated by VCats; the platform has previously enabled investments into promising start-ups such as vPhrase Analytics, Siftr, ConfirmTKT and LenDenClub, underlining its commitment to raise the country’s innovation quotient and drive the cause of entrepreneurship. With key emerging areas such as Fintech, Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security and Data-driven Intelligent Software as its priority, VCats is building a comprehensive, end-to-end ecosystem to support and nurture tech-centric start-ups in the country using its extensive angel network and auxiliary support infrastructure.
About Venture Catalysts:
Venture Catalysts is India’s first Seed Investment & Innovation Platform which adds value to start-ups through its angel network, venture fund, co-working facility and effective post-investment support.
Founded by Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, former Executive Vice President at Venture Nursery, Mr. Gaurav Jain, (Former Venture Capitalist at GenNext Ventures, IIT Grad and an MBA from Stanford), Mr. Anuj Golecha (Angel Investor & Partner, Banshi Jain & Associates), Mr. Anil Jain (Co-founder, Wallfort Financial Services Ltd. One of the largest institutional broking firms of India) and Venture Catalysts brings lethal combination of Capital, Mentoring and Business Network to help investee companies to succeed.
With an end-goal of disrupting the Seed Investment industry, VCats will be looking to integrate services to address the various start-up requirements on a single platform. The company is looking to have about 800-1000 active angels onboard its platform in the near future.