WASHINGTON: In 2012, when Ashok Yerneni was heading the telematics business unit of an MNC, he found that the market was very fragmented with a few enterprising businessmen importing Chinese hardware, and marketing it with simply a Windows application. Sensing the business opportunity, a year later, he started telematics IoT startup AssetTrackr. “There were no credible enterprise level solutions at that time. However, Google Maps for India was getting matured, GSM/GPS chipset prices were dropping, and GPRS/3G networks were beginning to be widely available,” Yerneni, who is Chairman, CEO and MD of AssetTrackr says, adding that he met his co-founders Vikas Minda and Abhijit Das, and that they felt the market was ripe for well thought-out solutions. The startup has over 300 clients including BigBasket, ITC, GMR Highways, DTDC and Spar Hypermarket.
AssetTrackr helps businesses track their mobile assets, analyse operations and help optimise the resource utilisation to improve business efficiency through its three main products — Fleet management solution for business customers who want to track, analyse and optimise their business operations; Delivery Dispatch Solution (Zoblite) for scheduling, managing and optimising home delivery services; and Personal Vehicle Tracking solution (SafeKar.com) for tracking one’s personal vehicle.
AssetTrackr has a small hardware device that gets installed in one’s vehicle or in any type of movable asset. This device uses the GPS satellite data to retrieve the current location and sends this information via GPRS network to its cloud hosted servers. “In addition to location, other information like speed is also sent over. Our cloud servers receive this information, process it, map it on to Google Maps, and present the information to the user in an easy-to-understand interface. Analytics are automatically run to generate useful information in the form of reports,” Yerneni explains. Talking about revenues, he says, “Our revenues have doubled every year since inception, and we have turned profitable in less than three years. Earlier this year, we also received angel funding of $500,000 from Kiran Basani, CEO of AddOnUSA, an American enterprise solutions company, among others.
According to a Telematics Wire report, the industry is expected to reach $113.7 million by 2018, with a CAGR of 22%, from 2013 to 2018. AssetTrackr, which has a team size of 25, wants to continue to expand its service offerings, and aims to achieve $20 million in revenues by 2020. “Our software is a SaaS model implementation. Customers typically pay for the devices and installation, and a monthly subscription fee per device. We have been continuously innovating and expanding into applications in the IoT space, value-added services on top of our base platform, servicing the delivery dispatch management (Zoblite) needs for logistics and delivery companies, developing a direct-to-consumer product (SafeKar) for personal vehicles (driver-driven or self-driven),” he says.
