-Sanjay Puri, CEO, Auto Nebula
Why have you selected Connected Transport as your main focus?
Looking at the infrastructure sector, a large amount of deaths are happening in India and the US. (Consider) what can happen if you look at Connected Transport, intelligent transport, the benefits that can accrue to the population, the benefits that can happen to GDP growth when we have smarter transportation; the quality of life improvement. That is why I have selected this domain.
How does it work for you?
The business model is basically we are looking for entrepreneurs who have an idea, innovators who have technology, companies who want to spin off. We give them physical infrastructure, marketing expertise, invest $50,000 to $1,00,000 in each of these companies and over a period we actually help grow these companies; and as they say, birds have to learn to fly on their own. We do handholding, giving them money, then we see whether they fire on their own or not. We have 50 or 100 of these companies and even if one of these can make a disruptive revolution happen like Uber or Google, we are keen to see what we can do.
Being a finance person, what made you interested in Connected Transport?
Although my background is finance, my interest is heavily in technology. So I have always been looking at challenges like smart cities, how can then they sustain without smart transportation. We believe that with better quality of life, there will be improvement to productivity in India and we look at the actions that happen.
A one-liner from you on Connected Transport…
It is basically the method of knowing whether other vehicles are coming, to making an opportunity for you to be safe and more convenient.
For India: Transportation safety, efficiency and convenience is much more important than people realise, as it is going to improve one’s life and create jobs and also save a lot of lives. So I would ask people to pay a lot of attention to transport, which we do not pay today.
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