RoshAi’s Rs 400cr journey fuelling 'driverless’ revolution from Kochi to the world

Kochi: If there is one Indian startup which is literally “driving” innovation, it’s RoshAi. The company based in Kerala’s Infopark Kochi campus is doing what Elon Musk has been up to in the USA – developing driverless cars. And they are already at it.

Founded formally in 2021 after years-long innovation and testing that dates back to 2010, RoshAi is today valued at Rs 400 crore, according to its founder. It all started from a near-death experience of Roshy John, a robotics and AI engineer who had a narrow escape from what could have been a fatal accident on his way home from the Bengaluru airport in 2010. “The driver was drowsy and he was about to hit a divider. I had to make him sit on the rear seat and drive the taxi myself ,” Roshy recounted.

The scary night prompted him to reflect on what he was doing. He was the head of R&D of a multinational company then. “I did my PhD in robotics from NIT Tiruchirappalli and I had many patents in mobility and robotics and all. I thought like when I do all those things for international market my people in India were dying because that driver told me he took the ride because he could earn Rs 150 or Rs 200.”

The thought prompted Roshy to explore the unexplored and, at that time, unthinkable to many paths of autonomous driving. He took the virtual road in 2011 before creating the first prototype out of a manual transmission TATA NANO in 2014. What awaited Roshy and his friends were no nano achievements. In 2018, they did a live demonstration of a more secured and reliable drive-by-wire AutoDrive version of the car at the Kerala Police Cyber Security Conference 2018.

In 2020, they introduced their third prototype with an integrated sensor hardware mounted on a BMW 3- Series on the road. The company was registered in Hyderabad the next year. By 2023, the company had a fleet of cars fitted with RoshAi Drive By Wire Systems to test, evaluate, and benchmark advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles (AV) applications on different test tracks in India.

Roshy hit the entrepreneurial track after quitting as TCS’ global head of Robotics and Cognitive Systems. His friend and former colleague Rajaram Moorthy joined him as co-founder and CTO. Roshy said the company was shifted to Kochi in 2022 because of the cooperation of Infopark as well as the Kerala police. The startup has a 60-member team sitting in Kochi and Chennai now.

Though driverless car is the glitzy part of the startup, its business side is more practical and realistic. RoshAi is a B2B deep-tech startup pioneering in autonomous driving and related AI enabled solutions worldwide. Its mission is to revolutionise the future of mobility by creating a data-centric knowledge framework for the autonomous driving industry.

The company aims to address a major gap in the market by offering a cost-optimised deployment and scalable knowledge framework for autonomous vehicle technology for cluttered traffic conditions. “At RoshAi, we are developing large scenario models just like AI giants make large language models,” Roshy told Onmanorama.

“Currently, we are supplying our driverless and AI technology for most of the automotive companies in India, largest ports and mining industries, German luxury car manufacturers, sports car manufacturers and US-based electric car manufacturers. We are focussed on revolutionising these industries with AI SOC (system on chip) and end-to-end solutions which increase their productivity and reduce operational costs,” Roshy said.

“We have a confirmed customer pipeline for close to Rs 480 crore,” he said. The company has raised a seed round of Rs 8.3 crore during last year, and it is now opening for a post-seed round from mid-March 2025.

Roshy is well aware of the concerns of potential job losses due to the advancement of autonomous driving technology. “Gone are the days of excietement about driverless cars because it is already a reality. The nature and status of the job of a driver will change in future. For that upskilling and reskilling will be necessary,” he said, citing the scenario where one driver will be controlling 50 cars remotely.

(Startup Saturday Season 2 is Onmanorama’s exclusive bi-weekly series featuring informative and inspiring stories from Kerala’s thriving startup ecosystem. The season 1 of the series featured stirring stories of 40 startups, which showcased the diversity of the Kerala startup ecosystem.)