If you ever get stuck at a traffic signal in Whitefield, a neighbourhood of Bengaluru, and see a fellow commuter driving a dark grey Toyota Fortuner, don’t mistake him for just another techie. Chances are that he is Avneesh Agrawal, co-founder of artificial intelligence start-up Netradyne on his way to the office. A gadget equipped with cameras mounted behind the rear-view mirror of his car records his driving pattern and surroundings. It also recognises everything on the road including vehicles, pedestrians, animals and red lights. Its algorithms assess unsafe driving and traffic violations like tailgating and harsh braking. It predicts emergency events and can alert the fleet supervisors.
Netradyne, with offices in Bengaluru and California, is aiming to disrupt the commercial vehicle and driver analytics market with its artificial intelligence (AI) platform. It is running trials in the U.S. and is set to start testing the technology in India, too. The global commercial telematics market is expected to grow from $20.02 billion in 2015 to $47.58 billion by 2020, said research firm MarketsandMarkets.
“We are learning how humans ride. This is going to be useful for us to train machines to drive,” said Mr. Agrawal, 45-year-old chief executive of Netradyne.
AI-video marriage
He said Netradyne is the first commercial vehicle technology provider to combine artificial intelligence with video to detect and determine causality of events. AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems and machine learning. Netradyne also attracted $16 million in investment from Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries last June.
A former executive at Qualcomm, Mr. Agrawal moved to India from the U.S. five years ago to lead the chip-design firm in the country. But seeing the availability of talent and resurgence of technologies like AI, he decided to take an entrepreneurial plunge to create a bigger impact. “I realised professionally, a lot can be done in India,” said Mr. Agrawal, an alumnus of Stanford University.
Mr. Agrawal, who has 159 U.S. patents, started Netradyne in 2015 with former colleague David Julian. Mr. Julian has worked on digital and satellite communication as well as supported Voyager and Cassini Deep Space programmes at NASA.
Named after the Sanskrit word for eyes and the Greek word for force, Netradyne has built a camcorder-sized device, equipped with a credit card-sized supercomputer to harness the power of machine learning. The gadget is also fitted with four cameras, sensors and 4G wireless technology that transmits information in an emergency situation. The firm said that until the unveiling of its platform, legacy video systems required fleet managers to constantly monitor feeds to identify actionable events.
Netradyne is targeting commercial fleets and insurance firms in the U.S. Its platform can also identify and reward positive driver performance as well as flag at-risk conditions. The firm said that this could be leveraged by its client base. Netradyne said that it had covered 500,000 miles of running trials using commercial vehicles across the U.S. It plans to unveil the product in the U.S. in March and in India later this year.
