Birds Eye, a Mumbai based Geographical information systems startup has raised Rs 2 Crore ($400,000) from Indian Angel Network (IAN), reportsVCCircle. The captial will go towards expanding the company’s footprint across the country, enhancing the scope of services and further development of the product. Birds Eye Systems’ services are currently offered in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore and the company is planning to expand it to Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata in the next six months.
Birds Eye, currently offers two products — Traffline and a mobile Taxi booking service, TaxiGo. The Taxi Booking service claims to serve more than 15,000 customers while Traffline claims to have 1,000 unique visitors per day.
Traffine, which is Birds Eye’s flagship product provides real time traffic updates to commuters by using available GPS data sourced from cabs and buses that are already on city roads. The company claims that commuters can reduce road travel time by almost 20% by using Traffline. The company also plans to tie up with telecom operators to provide traffic updates on pre-selected routes to subscribers in the forms of text messages. Currently the traffic updates available on the website and mobile are free of cost. The company plans to earn revenues from the value added services (VAS) that they intend to provide to other businesses. Traffline is available on Web, Mobile and as an Android app.
Founded by Brijraj Vaghani and Ravi Khemani in March 2009, BirdsEye had earlier received Rs 15 lakh from the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), Ahmedabad, last August. IAN investor members Rajiv Dadlani and Nitin Agarwal have joined the board of Birds Eye Systems.
Birds Eyes’ Traffline competes against Nokia Navigation which recently extended real time traffic updates on web based maps to mobile maps and navigation app, Nokia Drive, on its Symbian and Windows Phone smartphones. Apart from that MapMyIndia also provides real time traffic updates in Delhi and Mumbai.
