Logistics AI Provider Netradyne Is The First Unicorn Of 2025

The provider of logistics AI solutions, Netradyne has become the first Indian unicorn of 2025 after raising $90 Mn in its Series D funding round led by existing backer Point72 Private Investments. 

In a conversation with Inc42, Netradyne cofounder and CEO Avneesh Agrawal said that the funding round saw the startup’s post-money valuation soar to $1.34 Bn. Before this, Netradyne had last raised $65 Mn in 2022 from Silicon Valley Bank in a mix of debt and equity funding at a valuation slightly lower than $1 Bn. 

Including the latest funding round, Netradyne has raised $317 Mn across four funding rounds from the likes of Reliance, M12, SoftBank, Qualcomm Ventures, and Pavilion Capital, among others.

The unicorn milestone for the startup came in its 10th year of operation. Agrawal founded Netradyne in 2015 after spending a decade working for semiconductor major Qualcomm. Agarwal helmed research and development at Qualcomm, leading its connectivity chipset product line business. 

The Stanford PhD holder partnered with his former batchmate and Qualcomm colleague David Julian to establish Netradyne. The startup, which has offices in California and Bengaluru, aims to make roads safer via its AI-powered fleet safety and video telematics solutions. 

Netradyne provides fleets of all sizes with features such as a video safety camera and fleet performance analytics tracking, as well as driver awareness tools to help reduce risky driving behaviour and reward safe driving decision-making. Its flagship product, Driver.i, provides fleet operators the ability to visually check and assess driver behaviour. 

These visuals are analysed by the startup’s AI offering, detecting distracted driving behaviours like drowsiness, texting, or other such patterns that could lead to fatal accidents. After assessing, the system flashes an audio alert to get the driver’s attention back on the road. 

Agarwal said that Netradyne has a user base of over 3,000 and its systems monitor 700 Mn miles globally every month. He claimed that the startup’s customers see a 30-50% reduction in accidents after deploying its solutions.

 

With the fresh funding, the startup will continue to focus on its generative AI function and build its own foundational driving model to help identify blind spots and other difficult-to-predict scenarios. 

“We have access to a lot of GPUs because we are running hundreds of thousands of these devices at the Edge. Hence, we are training our own foundational driving model to start targeting corner case scenarios to identify difficult conditions that are hard to predict. Besides, a lot of Indian driving is difficult to anticipate and predict, but I believe that will also start to happen with GenAI models and we can get to the next level of sophistication for Indian driving conditions as well,” he added. 

On the financial front, the cofounder said that the startup clocked a revenue of $210 Mn in 2024, up 65% from 2023. With its increased focus on AI, he said Netradyne is expected to grow its top line over 50% in the short term. 

Netradyne is eyeing profitability in 2025, after which, the founder said, the startup’s board will decide if it should go for an initial public offering (IPO). 

“My goal right now is to drive revenue growth, drive to profitability. Once that is achieved, we may think of going public,” he added.

The cofounder claimed that Netradyne’s services are being utilised by businesses across India, the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. With the fresh capital, Netradyne is also looking to get its services on the roads in Japan, Ireland and several other regions of Europe in the next six months.

While a large chunk of the startup’s revenue comes from the US market, the cofounder believes that the revenue from India will rise rapidly in the coming years. 

For context, the Union Minister of Road Transportation and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, recently said that about 1.8 Lakh fatalities took place in 2024 due to road accidents.

“Clearly, the accident situation in India is not good. However, I have seen positive signs like increasing awareness and interest to rectify this issue in recent times. Thus, we are beginning to get a lot more traction, especially from large enterprise customers,” Agrawal said.

He said that Netradyne has onboarded clients like Nestle, and Hindustan Unilever (HUL) in India, which augurs well for its expansion in the country.

With this, Netradyne has become this year’s first and the 119th unicorn of the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem. 

Interestingly, the deeptech startup, Netradyne, has become a unicorn at a time when there is an increased interest in the space. With an increasing number of deeptech funds being launched, policymakers are also advocating giving this space a high-octane boost in the form of fund of funds startups.

In July last year, Ganapathy Subramaniam and Mathew Cyriac floated Yali Capital, a Category 2 AIF specialising in deeptech.

With a dry powder of INR 810 Cr (around $100 Mn), the fund is focussed on investing across deeptech sector and in segments such as chip design, robotics, aerospace and defence, genomics, space, manufacturing, and the wide world of AI.  

In the deeptech space, Netradyne has joined the flock of unicorns like Krutrim.and 5ire.

[Edited by: Vinaykumar Rai]

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