“I have not had a very good experience with driving on Indian roads, so I realised that taking a cab on a daily basis would be a better idea. While talking to cab drivers, and that too over a period of time, I realised drivers often complained that petrol pumps are always crowded. Those conversations stuck in my mind, and I wondered if I could work on a solution that lets people know how crowded a gas station is, which would save a lot of time,” Kaushik tells indianexpress.com.

Kaushik discovered the thought for his first startup whereas he was nonetheless within the third 12 months of engineering at BITS Pilani. He then reached out to Nair and Sisodia, who introduced their experience, and the trio started engaged on ideating the idea, which took one other 12 months. “We were clear we wanted to solve the problem using software, so we began studying how Google Maps and MapMyIndia work. We tried to understand how visit attribution works, how routing algorithms work, and how congestion flow works,” he explains.

Nawgati was included and incubated on the BITS Pilani campus. In the preliminary phases, Kaushik’s startup acquired funding from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s TIED 2.0 grant, the place monetary assist of Rs 7 lakh is offered to a startup with a Proof of Concept (PoC). This grant can additional be used to assist the thought convert from an idea to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Kaushik and the workforce then used the grant to deploy the {hardware} that wanted to be put in on the gas stations.

Over 12 lakh customers are utilizing the Nawgati app, which has 1.5 million downloads.

“We have built our own computer vision algorithms. Using existing cameras, we map the entire station, including the locations of the current dispensers and dispenser islands – at entry points or exit points, all of these things are automatically done. We then study the pattern using images, instead of videos, which require specialised hardware and heavy compute power at a very low frequency. That’s how we are able to calculate the surf time for each dispenser island and each category of vehicle,” the 25-year-old explains. Kaushik says his expertise, for which a patent has been filed, can inform what’s the anticipated ready time for a brand new automobile at a gas station utilizing the present state of affairs.

“Google can only do the visit attribution. They don’t actually know how many people are going to the pump, what the consumption is like, which dispenser is working, and which one is not working. We have all of that because we plugged our solution directly into the system. We get real-time data from the fuel stations,” Kaushik says, highlighting how the expertise his startup developed is exclusive.

According to Kaushik, there are two sides to the enterprise: one is aimed toward sellers and corporations who function gas stations, and the opposite is for normal customers. Its flagship product, Aaveg, which suggests “impulse” in Sanskrit, presents deep congestion monitoring and routing methods for gas stations. The firm expenses a subscription price per thirty days to generate all of the insights across the station. It’s principally an all-in-one gas retail ops platform.

Kaushik’s startup additionally plans to generate income via a congestion knowledge API, which is aimed toward fleet operators. “If you are Amazon or Flipkart, your objective is to make as many deliveries, and this can be possible if you know which fuel station has less waiting time.” On the B2C facet, Kaushik’s firm presents India’s largest gas discovery app, which anybody can use and is free to obtain from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. “We want to explore a freemium version of the app but right now we are looking at which premium features work best for users.”

Over 80,000 gas pumps are at present listed on the app, and out of these, 5,500 are CNG pumps. Over 12 lakh customers are utilizing the Nawgati app, which has 1.5 million downloads, and about 2.5 lakh month-to-month energetic customers.

To enhance the app and its person expertise, Kaushik banks on crowdsourcing. This might contain suggesting a brand new station that isn’t listed on the app or reporting that sure facilities usually are not out there in a selected gas station, particularly in far-flung areas.

Kaushik’s startup works with main oil and fuel corporations in India, together with Indian Oil, Indraprastha Gas, Hindustan Petroleum, and Jio/BP. The firm first demonstrated Nawgati’s options with a pilot venture with Indraprastha Gas Ltd (IGL) in Delhi, and later, IGL awarded 20 extra retailers, which led to a full-fledged order.

Kaushik feels gas stations are a lot greater than what they’re purported to be, and value-added companies can play a giant position in turning them into “mobility stations.” The mobility area would have a number of gas varieties, comparable to petrol, diesel, CNG, electrical, hydrogen, LPG; all of them will coexist. “We want to position ourselves as a fuel-agnostic fuel aggregator.”

The younger startup, co-founded by Kaushik, Aalaap Nair and Aryan Sisodia in 2019, has a 15-member workforce. (Image credit score: Nawgati)

Although Kaushik’s startup is pretty new, the plan is to scale up throughout the nation. The firm is already taking many initiatives, and one in all them is to carry the app to your automobile dashboard. Without revealing particulars, he says they’re working with one of many largest auto producers within the nation. Another manner Kaushik and the workforce need to supercharge the app is by including particulars like your automobile insurance coverage and when the final CNG cylinder hydro testing was performed.

Kaushik’s startup is backed by the Department of Science and Technology, MapMyIndia, Ministry of Information and Technology, together with angels from Amazon, Upwork, and Paytm.

“When I interned with PayPal for six months during the last semester of my engineering at BITS Pilani, I was in a dilemma whether to continue with this or keep building Nawgati. One-and-a-half-years after rejecting that offer, now I’m paying the same compensation to my people,” Kaushik recollects how he selected autonomy and appeared on the bigger scheme of issues together with his startup.