After Nirbhaya-app, now app for employee safety

Company to take this service to international market; to raise second round of Angel funding

After launching Nirbhaya-App, an application for women safety, Pune-based Smart Cloud Infotech today announced the launch of SmartCommute, a safety app for employees.

The business-to-business application will be available for use from next week. The company has already signed up a business process outsourcing firm from Guragon as its first client and is in talks with three other firm in Pune, Hyderabad and NCR region.

“We realized that though companies provide transport for their employees safety is not guaranteed. Usually, a women employee being dropped either needs to tell the security personal at the company that she has reached or they have to check if the employee has reached home or not. But many a times because of odd hours such calls are not made,” said Gajanan Sakhare, founder Smart Cloud Infotech.

SmartCommute is a solution for employee commute safety which helps track employees and vehicles during regular commute and also helps employees reach to transport management teams efficiently in case of an SOS situation.

SmartCommute comes with a mobile application for cabs, RFID integrated GPS systems for Cabs, mobile application for employees, automated risk management server deployed on cloud and specialized software to manage and operate the 24x7 mission control room.

SmartCommute that started its journey as mobile application and game development services is now focusing on the personal safety solution segment.

“With our Nirbhaya app we have seen over 15,000 downloads. And it continues to be one of the top women safety apps. We now want to take this success to B2B segment. In the consumer space where our app is free to download we will be including certain additions for a nominal subscription,” added Sakhare.

By August 2014, the company plans to introduce offering in the consumer space for subscription. “We did a survey in the NCR region and found that though applications like Nirbhaya are helpful they are not useful all the time as, due to the mental state of the person or due to the situation the person does not use the gadget. We are planning to come out with a gadget which will have an SoS button,” said Sakhare.

The company is also in the process of setting up a call centre which will give support to the person in case the SoS button is pressed. The assistance will be in the form getting in touch with the police or ambulance services or even to get in touch with family and friends. For this the company has already set-up strategic tie-ups with ambulance services, NGOs, police and volunteers.

“The B2B offering will be first launched in three cities—Pune, Mumbai and NCR region. And then we will take it national,” added he.

Funding

The company has also managed to get validation for its business model by getting funding from Angels. Till date they have raised Rs 4 crore from Angles that includes investors from Japan, US and India.

“Peter Relan of Studio9+ is one of the Angel investors. We are in the process tp raise another Rs 6 crore from second round of Angel funding. We are hopeful to raise it by April 2014. By the end of this year we will also raise our Series A round of funding which will be about Rs 50 crore,” he added. So far three VCs have approached the company for funding.

How does employee Commute Safety Work

Each cab will be enabled with Nirbhya Smart-Cab Monitoring System with RFID/Magnetic card reading ability.
Each employee id will be verified by the card reader as the employee boards/alight from the cab enabling to establish a link between the cab and the employee.

Nirbhaya: Be Fearless App will automatically show the driver information (with photo), cab information, route information, information of other members etc. Also employee GPS location will be validated.

Employees without a smartphone will get requisite information through SMS. However in this case GPS location of employee cannot be validated for such users.