Interview With The Founders Of Traffline, An App Which Gives Birds Eye View Of The City’s Traffic

Traffic has forever been a stressful thing to handle. We all have been through traffic jams and long waiting lines at signals. "We want to help people plan better & work around the stress caused by Traffic in the cities. With features like travel times and live alerts that we offer, commuting is so much easier for the people," says Ravi Khemani (founder). Birds Eye System’s product Traffline aims to provide real time traffic information to road commuters in India and streamlining traffic flows.

"The endeavor was to build an App for the city masses, which will enable them to plan their city travel with all the necessary information on the mobile phone," says Ravi. It is an easy to deploy solution which specifically addresses the nuances of commercially fast growing cities with increasing vehicular traffic.

[caption id="attachment_95307" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Founders of Traffline - Ravi Khemani and Brijraj Vaghani[/caption]

Based out of Ville Parle, Mumbai, the company has expertise in the areas of system design, statistical analysis, data mining and software development. The firm’s primary and niche products is a low cost, real time traffic monitoring system called Traffline for fast growing metropolitan cities, built around its patented algorithms. It was started by Ravi Khemani and Brijraj Vaghani in 2010. The founders worked in NextWave and Qualcomm before taking a plunge into Birds Eye System.

"The response has been immense and there's definitely a need for the App. There are more than 100000 App users, 30000+ on social media and thousands of website hits every day," says Brijraj, proudly.

They provide unique services some of which are below:

1) Dedicated Call center to help users/commuters with on location traffic update. They also assist the commuters to plan their travel time and route according to the traffic congestion.

2) A Timeline on the App which integrates social media, Traffline users and also the traffic police alerts into one place for all the comprehensive information for the user.

3) Real time traffic update is our core value propositions. Their information keeps updating every 1 minute. This helps the commuters to keep a track of the actual scenario on the roads.

4) Service of SMS/ Email alerts. The commuters have been provided with a SMS/Email facility for real time traffic update as per the time and requirement, which stands unique from others.

"We have around 60 employees that include system architects, senior level engineers, mobile application developers, quality analyst, and marketing teams,” says Utkarsh Sharma, SEO Analyst & Developer at the organization. “In 2011 we were incubated by CIIE (Center for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship). We are currently funded by Indian Angel Network,” says Ravi, proudly. "From the start of this project, we have received a lot of good feedback from everyone. We participated in an event by Qualcomm Ventures in 2009 for which we won a Q-Prize. We also emerged as winners at 'Power of Ideas', an event organized by Economic Times and IIM-Ahmedabad in 2010,” adds Brijraj. We asked them if they had any doubts before starting up, and they said, "We always had a clear idea of what we wanted to achieve. We did have difficulties but never any doubts."

“We have signed contracts with companies and fleet agencies which provide us with GPS Data for tracking traffic updates. Not just this, we also have feet on street along with tie ups with Traffic Police departments in the respective cities,” adds Utkarsh. They are currently operational in Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune. They plan to add cities like Chennai, Jaipur, Calcutta, Ahemdabad to the traffline network and also launching new apps for Public transport and parking.

Message for future entrepreneurs

Brijraj: "Keep innovating especially when you are a Startup as this will help you capture the Market."
Ravi: "Focus and look at avenue to always add value. And always assume various other challenges. Don't be afraid of taking a different track."

The best advice we got is, "If a user is having a problem, it's our problem." This line quoted by Steve Jobs has been implemented by them very well and they have made sure that no user faces issues.

Qualcomm Invests in Birds Eye Systems' Traffline

Mumbai based technology start-up Birds Eye Systems which which provides instant traffic information on its app called Traffline has raised funds in Series B round of funding from US based electronic chip firm Qualcomm's investment arm to expand its operations.

The company in a statement said that it has raised "fresh round of funding from Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures." The amount of deal and other details were however not revealed.

Birds Eye Systems' Traffline is currently cater in 3 cities - Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. The company plans to use the funds to expand operations in 10 cities by the end of this year. Funds will be used for product development, marketing and user acquisition, multi-city expansion and towards building a robust team across targeted cities.

"As a leader in wireless technologies, Qualcomm is pleased to invest in Traffline - a compelling mobile transport application that enables city navigation with real time information on traffic, routes and parking," Qualcomm Ventures Director Varsha Tagare said in a statement.

"Getting access to accurate and real-time traffic, travel and local information is a big problem for millions of Indian commuters in major cities. We want to address this problem using an approach tailored to Indian ethos and travel conditions," Birds Eye Systems Co-founder Briraj Vaghani said.

In December 2013, Birds Eye Private Limited had earlier secured its first round of institutional funding from Matrix Partners India and prior to which they had raised seed capital from the Indian Angel Network in April 2012.

Ravi Khemani and Brijraj Vaghani, the two founders of the start-up got the idea for Traffline while working in the US. They observed that in US, everyone was habitual of looking at traffic information before stepping out of the house and this resulted in much easier and worry less travel and traffic conditions. They soon realized that such an app would do wonders in a traffic crazy nation like India and with this intention the duo returned to the country. Read more in Traffline review article

Traffline give real time traffic updates and quickest route to your destination

How many times have you reached your office or college late? How many times you have been denied entry into a concert because you were late by 20 minutes? Traffic is one of the major hurdles faced in the everyday life by the citizens of the nation with the second largest population in the world. But now with traffline.com, it’s time to say goodbye to all your traffic woes. Now get set to reach your destination on time or even before time.

Traffline is available as website as well as Mobile app for Android and iOS devices users free of cost and can also been accessed on its mobile site traffline.com

Traffline has been designed with the best of features to improve your daily commute by saving time and fuel money. It helps you in finding the quickest route by telling you the travel time on all the routes leading to your destination by factoring in real time traffic conditions.

You can even subscribe to paid real time alerts to remain updated on events and incidents in your area such as concerts, rallies and protests that may choke the traffic on the routes on which you intend to travel.

The app also provides paid Live Agent Assistance in which the agent guides you through the best routes to your destination.

You can subscribe to the apps’ paid personalized alerts to know the traffic condition of your route before you venture out. You can get automated text messages at the time of your choice to know the latest on the traffic conditions on your specific route through this feature.

Birds Eye Systems, which is a Mumbai based start-up, is behind this wonder app. Traffline was launched in 2013 and has been accepted by the users with open hands.

Ravi Khemani and Brijraj Vaghani, the two founders of the start-up got the idea for Traffline while working in the US. They observed that in US, everyone was habitual of looking at traffic information before stepping out of the house and this resulted in much easier and worry less travel and traffic conditions. They soon realized that such an app would do wonders in a traffic crazy nation like India and with this intention the duo returned to the country.

Traffline currently provides traffic information and updates for Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and Delhi and has future plans of expanding in other cities. It has been highly endorsed by Bangalore, Thane and Mumbai Traffic Police for its reliability and accuracy.