Fueling the Future Intelligent Stations for Sustainability

Nawgati is an innovative startup established in 2019 by Vaibhav Kaushik, Aalaap Nair, and Aryan Sisodia. Dedicated to revolutionising the fuel station experience in India and beyond, Nawgati introduces an intelligent queue management platform. This platform aims to save time for both fuel providers and consumers, reduce congestion, and enhance overall operational efficiency.

Vaibhav Kaushik, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Greater Noida, is the Co-founder and CEO of Nawgati, India's first Fuel Aggregator platform. Known for his appearance on Shark Tank, he founded Nawgati in 2019 to reduce wait times and improve efficiency at fuel stations. A BITS Pilani graduate in Electrical & Electronics Engineering, Kaushik has worked on various government-sponsored projects, received the prestigious Indian Academy of Sciences’ Summer Research Fellowship, was presented with the Entrepreneur of the Year 2021 award when he graduated, and received recognition at the National Startup Awards 2022. He continues to drive innovation in India, transforming the fuel station experience.

Vaibhav Kaushik, Co-founder & CEO of Nawgati, discussed with Ciol about Nawgati's mission to revolutionise the fuel station experience in India. He shared insights on their future plans for expansion, innovation, and impact within the fuel station management sector.

Can you provide an overview of Nawgati and its mission in revolutionising the fuel station experience in India?

Nawgati or ‘Navgatih’ is the Sanskrit word for Navigation, and we are building a platform that navigates its users to have a more seamless fueling experience.

In simple terms, we are building a one-stop fuel aggregator platform that addresses the pain points of compliance and congestion monitoring for fuel stations and end consumers. It is built on state-of-the-art technology to revolutionise the fueling experience by providing real-time representation of changes at the station, allowing both fuel stations and consumers to save time and money, plan ahead, and make informed decisions.

How did the idea for Nawgati originate and what motivated you and your co-founders to establish the platform?

Nawgati's origin story is actually something that happened to me in real life. I am based in Greater Noida, and back in 2019 when I was interning in Noida, I relied on cab services like Ola and Uber, most of which run on CNG. Every time I passed a CNG station, I saw long queues of cars waiting outside of the fuel station for their turn. I realized how much time and money people were wasting stuck in those queues. Imagine if they could just know if there was a station nearby with much lesser or zero wait times – they could save a ton.

During one of those rides, I ended up chatting with my cab driver. He told me he could've easily made an extra 10% on his fares that day if it weren't for all that waiting in line. That's kind of when the lightbulb went off – everything I'd been thinking about clicked into place.

Here was a real problem people faced, and we had the tech skills and drive to solve it.  Me, Aalaap, and Aryan, we didn't have any experience in the fuel industry exactly, but we saw this as a shot at using our knowledge of tech to tackle a real-world issue. 

And that's how Nawgati was born. Our congestion and compliance monitoring platform is basically changing the game at fuel stations, making things smoother for both the stations 

What were the major challenges you faced in the initial stages of building Nawgati, and how did you overcome them?

We started Nawgati from our dorm rooms at BITS Pilani, and there couldn’t have been a better place to kickstart our journey.

The biggest challenges startups usually face are either around procuring the right tech, funds or talent. In our case, we didn’t have to face these challenges as we were sitting on a gold mine.

We had the knowledge to build the tech, the supportive people on campus who were willing to help us build solutions and BITS Pilani took care of the funding. We received our initial support from the PIED Society (Pilani Innovation & Entrepreneurship Development Society), which is BITS Pilani’s incubator. They funded us under MeitY’s TIDE 2.0 scheme in 2020, which gave us the solution to the most important challenge.

How does Aaveg work in optimising transit, wait, and serve times at fuel stations?

Aaveg is a vertical SaaS offering built for fuel companies and station owners. It provides a complete retail ops dashboard that showcases the real-time movement of every fuel station, acting as a single point of reference that covers the ground truth.

The platform helps fuel companies and/or dealers with congestion management, compliance monitoring, and automating forecourt operations by providing them with complete oversight of transit time, waiting time, serving time, attendants deployed, and under or over-utilization of resources. All this real-time data and metrics enable the users to scale up or down operations at any outlet and make decisions backed by data to optimise their resources.

Can you share any specific examples or success stories from the implementation of Aaveg, particularly highlighting its effectiveness in congestion management and compliance monitoring?

Aaveg is being adopted by major gas companies in India. We have helped these companies by building an entire forecourt automation system to provide a round the clock representation of customer influx at each outlet and their fuel consumption. This has allowed the fuel station owners to access the live movements and make real time, data backed decisions.

This has removed unnecessary human intervention, enhancing operational efficiency at the fuel stations and catering the end consumers at a faster rate. This has improved the overall effectiveness of routing systems used in Nawgati Fueling App, by reducing serve and wait times for fueling convenience – saving time and money, and avoiding long queues.

Could you provide a detailed explanation of Nawgati's pilot project with Indraprastha Gas Ltd (IGL) in the Delhi region? What were the principal discoveries or results of this endeavour, and how did it confirm the efficacy of Nawgati's solutions?

Before Nawgati’s intervention, Indraprastha Gas Limited’s consumer-facing mobile application (IGL Connect) required manual intervention to update the wait times of each fuel station. The staff used to log the on-ground status of each fuel station in Delhi NCR every 10 minutes. 

Our collaboration with IGL changed the whole process as we replaced the manual intervention with our patent pending technology, Aaveg. We installed our edge devices and set-up the Aaveg dashboard which captures the real time movement and the ground truth without any human intervention. Now, IGL Connect is directly linked with our plug-n-play systems providing its users with real time updates from the fuel station.

How did being featured on Shark Tank India Season 2 impact Nawgati's journey and growth?

While we had the tech and an action plan to reach out to fuel companies, we lacked visibility and accessibility. With Shark Tank, we were not only able to raise funds but also become more visible to our potential customers. Moreover, this appearance got us huge traction. We increased our user base to 12 lakh consumers on our fuel discovery app across Android and iOS platforms.

Could you discuss the support and backing Nawgati has received from notable figures such as Aman Gupta, Amit Jain, ministries, and companies like the Department of Science and Technology, MapMyIndia, Ministry of Information and Technology, as well as angel investors from Amazon, Upwork, Paytm, etc.?

We received our initial funding from BITS Pilani’s incubator, Pilani Innovation & Entrepreneurship Development Society (PIEDS). They funded us under MeitY’s StartUp Hub TIDE 2.0 scheme in 2020. This funding put us on the map with other startups competing for government backing and made our idea more credible. 

More recently, we have received funding from GAIL under its Pankh Initiative, the Department of Science and Technology (a govt. Undertaking of the Ministry of Science & Technology) under the NIDHI Seed Support Scheme. Besides these government agencies, we also have been supported by MapmyIndia, All in Capital, Shark Tank investors Aman Gupta and Amit Jain, and other angel investors.

What are Nawgati's future plans and goals in terms of expansion, innovation, and impact within the fuel station management sector?

We are continuously building newer partnerships to make our platform and offerings more cohesive with the existing fueling ecosystem. We recently collaborated with Mahanagar Gas Limited (MGL), providing a digital touch for the gas filling process and making the lives of our customers convenient.

We are also in the process of expanding our reach in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities including but not limited to Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Bhopal, Chennai, Pune, Lucknow, Patna and Jaipur over the next six months. We will deploy our B2B services at 2,000+ outlets over the upcoming 2-3 quarters.

In terms of innovation, our focus is on improving the experience for end consumers using the Nawgati Fuelling App by adding additional features. All our future plans and goals aim towards creating a more digital-forward fueling ecosystem, ultimately to make the lives of our users, whether B2B or B2C, equally better.