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“Fueling is the single most high-frequency activity that anyone does… we want to make your experience more rewarding and engaging so that you can save time,” Vaibhav Kaushik, Co-founder and CEO of Nawgati, explains the logic behind his fuel aggregator platform.
Founded by Kaushik, Aalaap Nair and Aryan Sisodia in 2019, alumni of BITS Pilani and VIT Vellore, the Noida-based startup aims to solve a common problem that most people face every day – waiting in a long queue at the petrol pump during peak hours. Their solution is an app that monitors real-time congestion, letting users identify less crowded stations nearby, thereby reducing wait times.
“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 found the idea for his first startup while he was still in the third year of engineering at BITS Pilani. He then reached out to Nair and Sisodia, who brought their expertise, and the trio began working on ideating the concept, which took another year. “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 incorporated and incubated on the BITS Pilani campus. In the initial stages, Kaushik’s startup received funding from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s TIED 2.0 grant, where financial support of Rs 7 lakh is provided to a startup with a Proof of Concept (PoC). This grant can further be used to help the idea convert from a concept to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Kaushik and the team then used the grant to deploy the hardware that needed to be installed at the fuel stations.
Over 12 lakh users are using 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 technology, for which a patent has been filed, can tell what is the expected waiting time for a new vehicle at a fuel station using the existing scenario.
“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 technology his startup developed is unique.
According to Kaushik, there are two sides to the business: one is aimed at dealers and companies who operate fuel stations, and the other is for regular users. Its flagship product, Aaveg, which means “impulse” in Sanskrit, offers deep congestion monitoring and routing systems for fuel stations. The company charges a subscription fee per month to generate all the insights around the station. It’s basically an all-in-one fuel retail ops platform.
Kaushik’s startup also plans to generate revenue through a congestion data API, which is aimed at 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 side, Kaushik’s company offers India’s largest fuel discovery app, which anyone can use and is free to download 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 fuel pumps are currently listed on the app, and out of those, 5,500 are CNG pumps. Over 12 lakh users are using the Nawgati app, which has 1.5 million downloads, and about 2.5 lakh monthly active users.
To improve the app and its user experience, Kaushik banks on crowdsourcing. This could involve suggesting a new station that is not listed on the app or reporting that certain amenities are not available in a particular fuel station, especially in far-flung areas.
Kaushik’s startup works with leading oil and gas companies in India, including Indian Oil, Indraprastha Gas, Hindustan Petroleum, and Jio/BP. The company first demonstrated Nawgati’s solutions with a pilot project with Indraprastha Gas Ltd (IGL) in Delhi, and later, IGL awarded 20 more outlets, which led to a full-fledged order.
Kaushik feels fuel stations are so much more than what they are supposed to be, and value-added services can play a big role in turning them into “mobility stations.” The mobility space would have multiple fuel types, such as petrol, diesel, CNG, electric, hydrogen, LPG; all of them will coexist. “We want to position ourselves as a fuel-agnostic fuel aggregator.”
The young startup, co-founded by Kaushik, Aalaap Nair and Aryan Sisodia in 2019, has a 15-member team. (Image credit: Nawgati)
Although Kaushik’s startup is fairly new, the plan is to scale up across the country. The company is already taking many initiatives, and one of them is to bring the app to your car dashboard. Without revealing details, he says they are working with one of the largest auto manufacturers in the country. Another way Kaushik and the team are looking to supercharge the app is by adding details like your car insurance and when the last CNG cylinder hydro testing was done.
Kaushik’s startup is backed by the Department of Science and Technology, MapMyIndia, Ministry of Information and Technology, including 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 recalls how he chose autonomy and looked at the larger scheme of things with his startup.
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