Why we invested in Intents Mobi

A few weeks ago, Intents Mobi announced its $600K round from a clutch of seed stage investors, including Auxano, Modulor Capital and us, among others. Intents is an innovative AI-driven geospatial intelligence company that's pioneering situational awareness in mobility & transportation. These may sound like a bunch of buzz words, but the work Intents is doing is really transformative, their timing very ripe, and India’s recent decision to de-regulate geospatial information adds another dimension to it.

And we wanted to take this opportunity to unpack what they do, why they're important, and why we invested in the company.

Raju and I’ve known Tabrez, the founder of Intents Mobi, for over 15 years as a colleague, friend & entrepreneur, and as one of the nicest people around. If you were in trouble and needed help, you’d want him on your side. But importantly, we also saw his strong streak as a tech tinkerer and builder over these years. And as is usually the case with most tinkerers, the impact of what they’re attempting doesn’t become obvious soon, and sometimes not even to the tinkerer themselves. I remember Tabrez built a smartphone lock screen app about 7-8 years ago as a fun side project, which scaled a bit and then he had to move on to his full-time priorities. One could say that it was a precursor to the massive opportunity Glance has tapped in recent years, but in entrepreneurship a lot has to come together – the right idea, its timing in the market, founders’ passion/fit for it, and also their timing in professional lives to jump into it – so that experiment ended its life as a weekend project. The journey of Intents also began in a similar experimental way, but it’s taking shape to be in a very different orbit!

About 3 years ago, Tabrez showed me an alpha version of a navigation app he had built as a fun side project that would alert drivers about potholes on roads ahead. I did wonder then if the use case for that was strong enough for him to really dedicate much time to it, honestly. I didn’t foresee that it could be the genesis of something larger that had the potential to change industries. Over the next 2.5 years, we had a few brainstorming sessions on a product with a much bigger canvas, its business model & GTM, and I appreciated that he was taking this on with a different level of passion & perseverance. The engineering & business problems his team was trying to solve were widening in scope and becoming increasingly complex, and the product was evolving into something incredibly innovative! Finally, by around December last year, we had built sufficient conviction to discuss the fundraise and our participation.

So, what does Intents Mobi do today and why is it needed? Here’s a brief summary of our internal thinking and why we invested in the company:

Efficient mobility/transportation requires multi-layered information beyond just a route on a map. When we drive anywhere, we intuitively overlay any route with our own mental model of several layers of information. In addition to the route and usual traffic info, we also think about -- road conditions (potholes, speed breakers, broken patches), safety conditions (streetlights, lonely stretches, average traffic speeds, area driving patterns), weather events (water logging, snowfall, landslides), any incidents (accidents, road blocks, construction), and key landmarks -- and then decide what's better given own vehicle type. This intuitive awareness drive our mobility decisions a lot of times, yet the currently available information is limited largely to location, route & traffic data. As mobility impacts everyone (people, civic bodies, logistics firms & motor insurance players), a lack of these additional layers of information is actually leading to losses of billions of dollars across several sectors of the economy, as well as of millions of lives every year.

Consider these statistics:

• Indian civic bodies are ending up spending 2-3x the amount on road maintenance per km compared to real costs (Mumbai spends 2x, Karnataka spends 3x). Despite this, the turnaround time to repair bad patches is abysmal. Same in most developing countries. Billions of dollars wasted.
• India ranks first globally in the number of road accident-related deaths, at about 150,000 per annum. Between 2016-18, about 10,000 deaths were attributed to potholes on the roads. Overall, about 3% of the total 150,000 deaths are attributed to negligence of civic bodies. Even in developed markets, potholes are an issue. It is estimated that UK drivers annually spend ￡4B in repairing car damages caused by potholes. Millions of lives lost & billions of dollars wasted.
• Mapping & navigation apps today do not offer routing by vehicle type, especially for India. This creates a lot of issues for delivery, logistics & fleet management firms. Billions of hours wasted.
• Motor insurance firms in India keep bleeding losses to the tune of 130% paid in claims for every dollar of premium collected. While 20% drivers would account for 80% claims, there is no way to change insurance premium driver to driver. Billions of - well, you get the gist.

What's the common theme in the above diverse issues? That there is a tremendous lack of several layers of critical information in mobility. Mobility isn't just about traversing point A to point B. To put it crudely, mobility information needs to account for who is going (driver), what is going (vehicle), how they'd want to go (urgently, safely) and where are the points of concern (road conditions, safety conditions & rest mentioned above). And availability of this information will allow all related stakeholders to make better decisions and make mobility better for us.

Intents is creating a future where this information (as it calls it ‘situational awareness’) is created, is real-time, and is readily available to all agencies that depend on it.

Intents' situational awareness data can drive transformational change across multiple sectors. Imagine very personalized routing when a driver navigates roads, automatic tracking of bad patches for road maintenance firms, transparency in process for civic agencies, driver behaviour scores for fleet management firms, vehicle-type-based routing for logistics players, advance warnings for external road conditions for autonomous vehicles, and driving behaviour linked insurance premiums for various motor users. These are quite powerful changes across a wide spectrum with a lot of benefits to eventual consumers like us, and Intents is on a big mission to drive them.

Of course, other attempts are being made to solve some of these problems. Without getting into details, the reasons Intents is doing better solving them at huge scale are multifold – it doesn’t require expensive dashboard cams or LIDAR scanning, it isn’t limited to basic OBD/GPS data, it's focused 3+ years engineering the AI-engine and is already able to accurately create several information layers, and it’s using the power of smartphones & community to do this, which have empowered it to grow to immense scale quickly and globally.

And the company is already making a big impact. Large enterprise clients across multiple industries, such as Here, Tomtom and Honda, now trust Intents' solution. And we’ve seen those partnerships becoming much stronger over the past few months. Today, Intents maps 10 million km roads every day, serves 3 million API calls from clients every second, processes 100 GB of image data daily, and has built a community of over half a million scouts. And they’re really just getting started!

Moreover, the opening of the mapping industry by India earlier this year & democratization of existing data sets will spur Intents’ innovation further and empower it to lead in the global ecosystem. The true impact of this will only unfold over the next year or so, but the early signs are extremely promising.

We’ve really excited to back Intents and look forward to witnessing the promising future it’s building unfold.

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Globevestor invests in ambitious founders in India & North America, through both our own seed funds and through syndicates raised from our private investor network. To start a conversation, reach out to Ankur or Raju directly or through a common connect. Or ping us if you're a founder building something awesome or an investor who wants to join our network.