Transerve Technologies Pvt Ltd is a technology leader in the field of location-intelligence for effective decision making. Having been acknowledged as a top emerging and innovative company by NASSCOM and Deloitte, its spatial platform Transerve Online Stack is now being leveraged for large scale social impact by various government departments. Transerve was seed-funded by CIIE-IIM Ahmedabad in its nascent stage; currently, it has Omidyar Network and Tara India Fund as its marquee social impact early-stage investors.

We had a chance to have a small questionnaire with Ashwani Rawat, Co-Founder & Director of Transerve Technologies. He has shared some interesting insights about the motivation behind Transerve, challenges faced as a start-up, and about the geospatial big data for effective decision making.

Lets look into the questionnaire in detail –

GIS Resources – Tell us about Transerve and the motivation behind it to start.

Ashwani Rawat – Transerve Technologies is a Location Intelligence company, which specializes in using geospatial and location datasets for effective decision making. Founded in December 2009, the company is headquartered at Panaji, Goa, and has offices in Delhi and Bhubaneswar. Transerve’s expertise lies in managing, analyzing, and visualizing Big Data for enterprises. Leveraging Transerve’s capabilities, users can design forms, collect information on the ground at a large scale with location-integration, manage, analyze, and publish it online. The platform has been empowering customers in segments like real estate, market research, FMCG, government, agriculture, asset management, smart cities, land records, environment and forests, social development, and census. Its location platform helps to design applications to derive and share intelligence with all the stakeholders in an organization.

India with its large population and diverse geographical locations has undergone rapid change wherein emphasis is laid on Smart City Development, Urbanization, and e-governance. Growing urbanization also led to an increasing need for solutions that can help to deal with urban civic issues such as water & sewage issues, traffic management, revenue management, etc.. There was a time when the market didn’t offer any platform for users to help analyze spatial data on the web with ease and the solutions which were available were extremely expensive and required a huge investment. Thus, this has made Amarsh Chaturvedi and Ashwani Rawat two IIT-Kanpur graduates come up with an idea of using data technology to transform the basic functioning of Indian urban cities with a scalable solution, thus contrived together the foundation of Transerve. The platform approach for spatial data analytics was envisaged by us keeping the big gap in growing sectors of urban tech and smart cities. Spatial knowledge gradually gained importance in the Indian environment due to large-scale implementation of projects and urban planning. Implementation of machine learning in GIS in solving revenue shortage and collection inefficiencies in Indian urban local bodies also became a big hit which is one of the first problems that Transerve managed to solve. Thereafter, the platform evolved to cater to other pressing issues in solving enterprise problems.

GIS Resources – What were the challenges faced by you as a start-up?

Ashwani Rawat – Back in 2009, the startup ecosystem was not as mature as it is today and hence the support systems were not in place. Like any other Start-Up in India, we also faced some issues unfriendly public procurement systems, lack of startup policies, investor interest in enterprise technology space, etc. Since most of our initial deployments involved working with Urban Local Bodies, initially we faced a lot of issues related to delayed payments. Gradually after successfully sailing through the tough initial phase, we also started working with private enterprises in order to diversify our customer base and use cases.

GIS Resources – How is the Government of India’s’ Start-up India initiatives helping start-up business in India?

Ashwani Rawat – There are a new interest and enthusiasm in the market to work with startups, in general. Platforms like Govt. e-marketplace are doing well when it comes to streamlining public procurement and also to provide a level playing field to startups.

GIS Resources – Give us a brief about company products/services and how they are helping in making better India?

Ashwani Rawat – Transerve’s flagship platform ‘CityOS’ and ‘Transerve Online Stack (TOS)’ has helped enterprises tremendously in solving a variety of pressing socio-urban issues while enabling smart-governance in the field of revenue collection, water, and sanitation optimization, mobile app-based citizen portals, spatial analytics, utility management to name a few. Transerve’s CityOS platform is an assisted decision-making platform that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence on geospatial big data to solve complex urban problems related to revenue sustainability, waste management, and urban planning to provide better citizen services. Transerve helps urban local bodies maintain an accurate database of properties on their spatial platform. The platform has the capacity to acquire and process information smoothly in a brownfield city that allows for analyzing and relating events, running simulations, and anticipating possible problems along with managing special events or even emergency situations. Transerve Online Stack is a technology enabler for developers and enterprises to leverage location data to derive meaningful insights. Be it simple use cases like planning a new location for starting a new retail store or use visualization on migration datasets to understand & plan social security schemes; TOS helps users in many ways.

GIS Resources – COVID-19 has hit most businesses and start-ups especially, how can Transerve help businesses in reducing the impact of the pandemic?

Ashwani Rawat – Our Flagship product Transerve Online Stack (TOS) playing a vital role in helping businesses who are trying to get their operations back on track. With the help of TOS enterprises can map Covid-19 density zones using geospatial technology. This advanced solution works on predictive analysis and uses layers of geospatial data to track, monitor, analyze, and visually represent them into data stacks. These data stacks will help in route optimization in Covid positive zones that can further assist businesses in making statistically-driven decisions.

With so many practical applications, TOS is emerging as a very effective tool for governments and businesses. TOS has been maintaining a Corona timeline and created interactive digital maps of all the districts in India, and color-coded them to monitor all the Covid-19 related information. We are also publishing map visualizations on Covid-19 related data released by government sources from time-to-time in order to help the public in understanding the infection and its containment.

Currently, we are supporting more than 50 organizations on a daily basis to manage their spatial datasets. Our platform is enabling organizations to draw insights from spatial datasets and sharing them among various stakeholders.

GIS Resources – How does Transerve Technologies see the future of Location Intelligence in combination with AI and Big Data technology?

Ashwani Rawat – Collection and analysis of location information is an ever exploding opportunity. Big Data, machine learning-enabled analytics, and evolving business models are gunning for location-based inputs to expand, retain, and optimally serve their customer bases. While business intelligence increasingly is getting dependent on Big Data inputs, location intelligence is getting crucial for contextualizing the decision-making process based on available information. We see location as a great binder or a proverbial glue that binds scores of discrete datasets together and hence Location Intelligence will have a great deal of role to play in the near future. To make the data usable, AI will assist users and location intelligence algorithms in providing analytical recommendations.

GIS Resources – Would you like to share the biggest achievement of Traverse?

Ashwani Rawat – Over the course of its journey so far, Transerve Technologies has received numerous accolades at both national and international scales. It has built a great reputation as a key location intelligence player in the market. Further, while working with various government agencies and multilateral funding agencies, Transerve has demonstrated a great deal of social impact. One of the most notable impacts has been our role in enabling land and property rights for urban slum dwellers in India.

Also Read –

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