“ROUTEMATIC IS BRINGING IN PREDICTABILITY, RELIABILITY AND A HIGH QUALITY OF SERVICE WHILE MITIGATING OPERATIONAL AND FINANCIAL RISK FOR THE ENTERPRISE”
An interaction with Surajit Das, Co-Founder and CEO, Routematic
How competitive is the taxihailing market?
We are living in the time where people prefer moving in a hired car or a cab rather than owning one or driving personal cars. As the demand for these cars is rising, so is the supply side of the industry. Multiple companies entering the industry with new features, new prices make the market a highly competitive one.
What is your USP and how is your business model different from that of exiting players, especially Ola and Uber?
Ola and Uber have very little market share in the corporate commute segment. Office goers prefer to travel by their own car for commute and use Ola/Uber for infrequent personal needs. This is mainly for two reasons. First, Uber/Ola can be very expensive during peak hours and second, the cabs may not be be available during peak hours. Routematicis able to solve the
problem by efficient route planning, demand estimation and innovative sourcing of fleet.
Could you elaborate on the business model?
Commute, i.e. travelling to and from work, is an annual USD 16 Bn industry in India. About USD 2.5 Bn out of the USD 16 Bn annual spend is incurred directly by corporate India (primarily IT/ITES, BPO, KPO companies) to extend daily transportation service to their employees. Routematic, currently operates in the corporate sponsored commute segment. Our business model innovations are rapidly disrupting the traditional operating model which is dominated by local unorganized non-tech fleet operators who offer poorly maintained cabs, unverified drivers and weak performance monitoring process. We are bringing in predictability, reliability and a high quality of service while mitigating operational and financial risk for the enterprise by using Big Data Analytics to predict demand, AI based route plan for every cab to minimize wastage and a unique cab aggregation model to build reliability/predictability in cabs. We currently operate in 4-seater and 6-seater segments for Corporate Sponsored Commute.
What kind of innovative and newer offerings will Routematic provide customers in the near future?
We plan to venture into the B2C market owing to the growing demand for office commute amongst individuals. We are gathering over 200 million data points everyday, to understand traffic congestion in the city. The intent is to understand how traffic of every corporate hub interacts with the rest of the city. With enough fleet volumes, we will be able to launch a chauffeur driver home pick up/drop service for all office goers in a shared cab format at very affordable
Routematic has been built from the ground up on cloud and offers fleet services on a SaaS model on app-based model. Also, by integrating all tech equipment in a cab (GPS, SOS signal, telematics, safety sensors etc.) on a single IOT platform, Routematicis able to generate significantly more value for its clients.
prices. Possibly 10-30% lower than Uber/Ola.
Any plans of expansion?
Routematic aims to be in five cities by the end of 2019. Currently present in Pune and Bangalore, the company plans to launch its services in Hyderabad, Chennai and Delhi NCR. Alongside, the company plans to make 30% of its fleet electric by March 2020.
What can enhanced-data transparency bring to the corporate commute market in India?
Anonymised GPS data is already actively harvested by a few data aggregators (typically GIS/maps companies), even the regional RTO’s have started sharing real-time traffic data through their portals. As more of such anonymised data gets shared and made available on a common platform, it would immensely help with traffic planning which would directly impact the commute market.
How has the emergence of technologies such as cloud and IoT allowed for the growth of Routematic as a service?
Routematic has been built from the ground up on cloudand offers fleet services on a SaaS model on app-based model. Also, by integrating all tech equipment in a cab (GPS, Panic Button, telematics, safety sensors etc.) on a single IOT platform, Routematicis able to generate significantly more value for its clients.