Energetica India Magazine May-June 2021

Manesh Jain Co-Founder and CEO, Flo Mobility Though the ecosystem has matured a lot over the past few years, there is a long way to go to make India a preferred startup destination. The on-ground impact of various large-scale initiatives is still very limited. Es- pecially for deep-tech startups, there has to be an impetus on R&D and tighter IP protection norms to make India a global R&D hub. In an exclusive interaction series with startup companies in the energy and mobility space, Manu Tayal , As- sociate Editor, Energetica India, interacted with Manesh Jain , Co-Founder & CEO of Flo Mobility. Here’re the edited excerpts from that interaction 38 energetica INDIA- May-June_2021 Shed some light on the idea behind the formation of Flo Mobility. Manesh Jain : We started Flo Mobility with a vision to build a smart, sustain- able, and most importantly, safer trans- port solution for everyone. Our road conditions are terrible, and our traffic is chaotic, which leads to a large number of accidents on the road every day. We need to change that. We also strongly believe that smaller and compact forms of the automobile will take precedence over current large and clunky cars. Cars are a very ineffi - cient way to travel around. We are using a 1-tonne vehicle to move an 80 kg hu- man being, and more so as 70% of rides are with a single person. Currently, we are a team of 8 great hand- picked wizards from different back- grounds who are working to achieve this mammoth goal. Who will be your target customers and what is your plan of execution? Manesh Jain : Our primary target mar- kets are the US and Europe. We will sell our technology to mobility companies who offer their vehicles to riders for last- mile commutes. The hardware cost to enable autonomous driving on a vehi- cle will be charged upfront, and recur- ring revenue will be generated through charges for offering teleride-as-a-Ser- vice. Our unit economics are positive from day 1 as we will make money on every tele-trip that we execute. Global micro-mobility companies will be our clients. There are more than 50 large companies with over 1 million scooters deployed on the streets. This includes few players who have a fleet as large as 50,000 scooters. Some prospects are Bird, Lime, Spin, Razor, Beam, Tier, Bolt, Skoot, Wheels, Dott, etc. We are already in conversation with a couple of fleet op - erators in the Middle East and Europe and we shall start our POC with them soon. In which regions Flo Mobility’s electric two-wheelers will be deployed first? What will be your plans? Manesh Jain : We were about to deploy our fleet in April 2021 when the pandem - ic struck. Now, we will resume roll-out once situation stabilizes. Over the next 8-10 months, we plan to deploy auton- omous tech on e-scooters in large resi- dential, educational, and industrial cam- puses in India, the US, Europe and the Middle East. The future roadmap is evident to us. We will deploy our fully autonomous technol- ogy on form factors like e-scooters and e-cycles. Initially, these will be monitored by a human operator who will take con- trol of the vehicles immediately in case they need assistance. Going forward, once our algorithms are trained with enough corner cases, our dependence on human operators will decrease, and the system will start becoming more and more autonomous. Eventually, we will extend the deploy- ment to other form factors like delivery bots, warehouse bots, rescue bots, etc. Kindly shed some light on your educa- tional background, achievements, and experiences across sectors, along with other founders. EMERGING INNOVATORS