Two years ago, Dipen Babariya and Mishal Jariwala had been on their manner to a friend’s residence in Surat. Google Maps recommended an change time-saving, shorter route. However, terrible street situations and erroneous data supposed it took the duo two times the time to attain their destination.

This ache factor led the youth pals to ponder developing an answer that supplied street and road-stage information. The duo labored on street circumstance mapping software program in university for 2 years and submitted it as a challenge withinside the very last year.

They received the first-class challenge award and had been quickly contacted via way of means of Surat Municipal Corporation for a pilot street evaluation for the metropolis to assist with street upkeep and city planning.

In 2019, this leap forward brought about the inception of RoadMetrics, a deep tech startup on a undertaking to map street and road information at scale.

The co-founders moved to Bengaluru to take their imaginative and prescient forward. They attended numerous tech meetings and startup meets in India’s Silicon Valley. At one such event, they met Nikhil Prasad Maroli, an commercial and operations engineer from Texas A&M University, who had again from the United States after running with Velodyne LiDAR and Tesla.

Together, the trio started out running to make their imaginative and prescient a reality.

RoadMetrics is an AI-primarily based totally answer that makes use of photo and sensor information acquired from a easy cellphone to categorise street defects, signs, site visitors signals, streetlights, etc. This street and road-stage information facilitates organisation mapping corporations and clever metropolis our bodies with analytics on street networks and a higher mapping experience.

RoadMetrics changed into one of the nominees at RAISE 2020. RAISE, or ‘Responsible AI for Social Empowerment’, changed into a summit organised via way of means of NITI Aayog and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

Nikhil says, “We use a market platform to gather crowdsourced information. As quickly as it’s miles uploaded to the cloud, our group tactics it with our AI-primarily based totally software program that identifies numerous street/road belongings and features. At this factor, RoadMetrics has a insurance of over 2,500 km in 3 cities, which includes Bangalore, Surat, and Jamshedpur with over 100,000 photo factors acquired.”

By early 2021, the corporation plans to go into the HD mapping area with the addition of LiDAR sensors that offer a whole three-D mapping answer with centimetre-stage precision.