Start-up Routematic helps companies in organising employees' daily commute

A smooth ride to office

With increasing traffic congestion in cities and inadequate public transport network, commuting to and from office is often uncomfortable and stressful. But Routematic, a Bengaluru headquartered-urban mobility platform, now claims to have found a solution to the daily commuting woe.

“Most enterprises in India, especially in the IT/ITES/BPO/KPO and the manufacturing sectors, extend staff transport facilities... This can be considered a company-organised ride-sharing service… Routematic has taken a B2B2C revenue approach, through which it engages with corporates to deliver a safe, reliable and cost-effective commute experience to their employees,” says Surajit Das, co-founder and CEO of Routematic.  

Recently, Routematic -- which started its operations in December 2013 after being founded by Das, Sriram Kannan and Kavitha Ramachandragowda -- raised $2.5 million in a pre-series A round led by Naresh Malhotra, serial entrepreneur and former Café Coffee Day CEO. Existing investor VAMM Ventures also participated in the round. With the latest round of funds, the company so far has raised $4.5 million.

The urban mobility platform works via an app on which office commuters submit their travel request. Requests from all the employees of a company are then handled by Routematic’s proprietary route optimisation algorithm to create efficient routes on which staffers are pooled together while giving each employee a travel-time guarantee.

Routematic operates a fleet marketplace that identifies a verified driver and a vehicle best suited to service for a specific trip. The trip details are available on the Routematic driver app.

The start-up has more than 60 companies as its customers across 14 cities in the country. Its customers include Infosys, Mindtree, Barclays, Allstate, Amdocs, RBS and Blackrock. Around 130,000 commuters use its platform.

Routematic claims to be the only solution with both demand side and supply side technology capabilities for serving office commuters.  “Our route optimization technology reduces the number of vehicles on the road by improving occupancy and reduces travel time for commuters by eliminating inefficient clubbing. The monitoring and dispatch technology of our fleet marketplace ensures safety, reliability and greater asset utilisation for the vehicles listed on the marketplace,” said Das.

The travel time for the commuters using the Routematic platform has reduced by about 10 to 15 minutes through route optimization and enterprises have been saving 25 per cent-35 per cent on their bills for providing transport services to their employees, claimed the co-founder. “Our 100 per cent AI-based route optimisation algorithm has not been matched by anyone else in the industry.”

In 2019, the company will focus on the expansion of fleet services in Pune and Bengaluru and augment supply with electric vehicles.  “We have a strong sales pipeline and so we expect to grow at over 100 per cent in 2019. We will also launch our fleet marketplace for our enterprise customers in NCR, Hyderabad and Chennai markets,” Das added.

In cities where Routematic has its fleet marketplace, it charges on per km basis. It is also exploring an alternative revenue model, such as a per employee per month subscription fee.

In cities where the start-up provides only employee transport planning solution to the enterprise, the latter is charged a SaaS (software as a service) subscription fee.