How two ex-Qualcomm employees are building a driver monitoring device

The California based artificial systems provider Netradyne which has a R&D centre in India is on the verge of launching the IoT based Driveri platform. This is a driver monitoring device for commercial and fleet management companies.

The efforts are being led by two ex Qualcomm employees, Avneesh Agrawal and David Julian.

With investments of $16 million from Reliance Industries venture capital division, Netradyne’s Driveri aims to alert fleet managers and drivers about any untoward incident or emergency on the road based.

This is done based on the device which is mounted behind the rear-view mirror of vehicles. This captures videos in a 360-degree format.

“Commercial launch is in March at US followed by India in summer. We have about 10 fleets in trial wherein we covered about half a million miles of drive testing,” says Avneesh Agrawal, CEO, Netradyne.

The monitoring device has multiple cameras along with LTE, GPS, accelerometer and a gyro meter. It is powered by the NVIDIA Jetson TX1 video analytics platform.


The device captures data points on whether the driver breaking is traffic rules, the distance maintained between the driver and fellow passengers on the road, safe distance from pedestrians and lane driving. All these parameters are taken from the visual feed and analysed real time.

“Our device analyses things on road and detects anomalous driving behaviour. It even sends across these videos to the cloud for further analysis. With this we shall be tracking every single vehicle on the road,” says Agrawal.

Agrawal explains that all these analysed data points show up in a dashboard at the fleet managements control centre. The site manager then gives points to driver based on their performance parameters. “The fleet management companies can create a score card for the car and incentive structure for the driver. This will be based on the driver’s safety rating and they can get bonuses based on their performance.”

While all these parameters clearly seem to work in the North American market, the viability of Driveri in India is still questionable.

“We are starting in US because they have well defined rules and instructions but in India those things are different as we need to train fleet guys. But our device is capable of handling Indian conditions as well. We are about to do a trial as some customers have shown interest,” says Agrawal.

Agrawal says that the timing of Netradyne Driveri product could not have been more apt considering the current push towards IoT and AI. After spending 21 years in Qualcomm, he thought this is the right time to enter this field. “For big companies, it is difficult to move into newer arenas. That was the motivation behind Netradyne.”

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