NE BUSINESS BUREAU
AHMEDABAD, APR 21
DevX Venture Fund, the investment arm of Dev Accelerator & co-working announced that it has invested in Gurgaon-based geospatial intelligence startup, Intents Mobi. The startup has raised $600K in its seed round. The round, led by Auxano Entrepreneur Trust, also saw participation from other VC firms such as Globevestor, Artha99 Investment, Modulor Capital, VGangels, the angel network at Venture Garage, besides DevX Venture Fund, says a release.
Founded by Tabrez Alam, Naresh Kumar Kachhi, Balasubramaniam S and Prakash Velusamy, the company is now 15 people strong with 13 members purely focussing on the technology development. The company utilises a network of ‘Scouts’ which is a community of over 500,000 users who contribute to the data generation for location intelligence.
Speaking on the occasion, Tabrez Alam, Founder – Intents Mobi, said, “At Intents Mobi, we work on solving the issues with GIS data that impacts all industries connected to mobility. Our hardware independent technology ensures that we are able to map the entire country without investing a lot on capex. India is a unique country with one of the highest densities of roads in the world and addresses that are inconsistent. Therefore, our focus is on gathering situational awareness information about the two most critical elements of routing, that is, the destination and the route. We will be using the funds to increase the collection of GIS information for India and for further developing our products. Since we already currently generate insights for almost 1.5 crore kms of roads per day and process 0.5 million geocodes, the funds will enable us to increase this by 5X and cover the 50 most populous cities of the country by the end of the year””.
Elaborating, Naresh Kachchi, CTO Intents Mobi, said, “Globally, 53% of the total logistics costs are attributable to the last mile logistics. These numbers get more skewed when we compare between rural and urban areas. In a country like India, where addresses are very unstructured, every single minute lost compounds to a huge figure in terms of losses. This is further aggravated by the fact that in India, we have a very wide variety of roads. As a result of which, a logistics firm cannot rely on any maps to route their trucks on an intercity route. We need to look at the data itself, to be able to solve these issues and that is what our focus is”. Intents Mobi counts some of the biggest names in various industries as their clients including Here Maps, TomTom and Honda among others.
Commenting on the funding, Umesh Uttamchandani, Co-founder & CGO, DevX, “Our investment thesis largely revolves around having a strong founding team since that is what early-stage investing is all about. With Tabrez Alam being a 2X entrepreneur previously working with Petsutra, we had no doubts in capabilities of the team. Also, India has seen tough times during covid with broken supply chains due to inconsistent road mapping data. This data would serve as a base for future technologies for building efficient supply chain systems. Intents already had those marquee names in their kitty as clients – the firms who would want to use this data to its maximum benefiting extent.”
Intents Mobi has some of the biggest names in various industries as their clients, including Here Maps, TomTom and Honda among others.
