TempoGo raises $825,000 in seed funding, adds IoT layer to its platform

TempoGo (www.TempoGO.com), an IoT and SaaS solution for commercial transportation, has raised $825,000 (Rs 5.21 crore) in seed funding led by K2 Capital of Hong Kong.

Over the past 12 months, the TempoGo solution claims to have been proven on over 1,800 inter-city trips in India covering 650,000-odd kilometres, for 300 clients including Bisleri, Oyo Rooms and Havells.

According to Vikas Goyal, owner of Shree Roadways, a 30-year old transportation company whose vehicles do over 6,000 long-distance trips per annum, "A lot of fuel is wasted if the vehicle engine is ‘On’ when idle. Earlier, there was no way for us to remotely track the vehicle’s engine status. Now, with TempoGo's solutions, we can do it within 30 seconds, reducing our fuel consumption by over 15 percent."

Pranav Shirke, co-founder and COO of TempoGo, is an engineer and MBA from IIM Calcutta. Shirke, who has previously worked with Infosys, TCS and was the co-founder and CEO of a healthcare operations start-up, says: “With the second-largest road network in the world, India has over 8 million commercial transportation vehicles that drive across the length of 4.7 million kilommetres of roads. But unbelievably, nearly 75 percent of these do not yet leverage technology.”

How it works

TempoGO’s IoT layer includes a GPS-based hardware unit (including a built-in vehicle immobiliser) that tracks vehicle location and speed and a sensors-set (monitoring ‘Door-open’ and temperature-variation status of the load-bay) plus an OBD 2 adapter to automatically record and transmit engine data as well as vehicle behaviour including sudden acceleration or deceleration. The SaaS layer includes Trip Management and Fleet Management software and a dashboard for actionable business intelligence using data analytics.

Aaditya Goyal, who heads technology, is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur, and was co-founder of last-mile urban transportation start-up Feedr and hyper-local delivery service BigZop. He says, “We are a unique combination of IoT sensors (GPS, temperature, door closing) on the vehicle plus a SaaS platform. This allows simple answers to key questions: Is my driver driving dangerously or at high speeds? Or pilfering fuel? Is he adhering to pre-decided routes? What state is my cargo in? Did the temperature inside my cold-chain container vary? When should I take them in for maintenance? How can I reduce vehicle insurance premiums?”

Sandipan Kumar heads the Product platform and has a Master’s (Computing and Mathematics) from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. He has spent over a decade with companies like PwC, IBM, TCS and Reliance Jio. He says "There are over 60,000 independent fleet operators, over 20,000 inter-city bus operators and 1.5 million passenger vehicles out there as our potential market."

The potential clientele includes freight transport companies, cold-chain companies, logistics companies, distribution companies with their own fleet of vehicles, bus or taxi operators, corporate employees or school/college bus fleets.

Harshwardhan Raikar, co-founder and CEO of Guarented, says, "TempoGo helped us tremendously in real-time route planning and delivery scheduling to fight the Bangalore traffic. Our customer happiness index has improved dramatically since.”

Prateek Maheshwari, co-founder and CEO, NightPanda, says, “TempoGo has helped us reduce a lot of time which gets wasted in explaining customer's address to the delivery boys.”