Can Cautio Fix India's Growing Cab Safety Crisis?

A few weeks ago, a cab driver was arrested for allegedly assaulting a woman after an argument over extra fare. In Hyderabad, a 25-year-old German woman was harassed on her way to the airport in April. A cab driver was booked in Bengaluru for assaulting a passenger and his family over a seemingly trivial disagreement.

Every few days, troubling headlines from across India tell a familiar story — a cab ride that turns into a nightmare. The incidents are recurring, span cities, involve both men and women, and cut across backgrounds, making it clear that cab passenger safety is not a local issue but a national one.

Although ride-hailing services disrupted the traditional cab industry with promises of convenience, transparency, and an added layer of safety through GPS tracking and driver verification, the gap between promise and reality is too wide.

There is no let-up on the reports of verbal abuse, harassment, physical assaults, and intimidation have become alarmingly frequent. The situation is particularly alarming for women, who often find themselves in vulnerable situations during late-night rides.

It was this pressing safety concern that sparked Cautio’s ideation. Founded in 2023 by Ankit Acharya and Pranjal Nadhani, Cautio specialises in providing dashcam solutions. Cautio’s AI-powered dashcams help fleet operators and commercial vehicles enhance safety for drivers and riders.

The visual telematics startup recently marked the final close of its seed funding round at $3 Mn (INR 26.3 Cr).

Cautio’s Creation From Crisis

While working with cab aggregator Namma Yatri, Acharya noticed a disturbing trend within the company — call volumes with passengers reporting severe safety threats were rising sharply. Conversations with industry peers at Rapido, Ola, Uber, and others revealed an equally grim picture.

“Although incident volumes were high, only about 1% were formally reported,” Acharya said.

The mission turned personal when, just a day apart, two people close to Acharya faced threats — one involving harassment in an auto from a major platform, the other involving the molestation of a colleague’s wife.

Taking matters into their own hands, Acharya and Nadhani sat on the drawing board to find a solution to this growing epidemic.

They started by running surveys and found that over half of the women preferred autos over cabs because they felt it was easier to make a quick escape in an emergency. On the other side, many drivers wanted dashcams to protect themselves from false accusations.

The duo of cofounders were looking right at a gaping safety void that no one else seemed willing or able to fill — precisely what led to the incorporation of Cautio.

“It was clear that India didn’t just need safer rides for passengers, it needed a system that safeguarded everyone in the vehicle,” Acharya said.

Cautio’s Leap To Full-Stack Visual Telematics

By June 2023, Acharya started researching India’s dashcam market and found that it was surprisingly untapped. The demand was there, but no scalable, reliable solution existed. With Nadhani as CTO, they started building prototypes.

In October 2023, a cold email to Vozi Cabs in Bangalore turned into their first deal. “That one customer was the validation that we needed to go ahead,” Acharya said.

For years, fleet safety in India relied on telematics, primarily GPS. However, Cautio founders dared to think beyond GPS.

“GPC can only tell you where the vehicle is, but not what’s happening inside,” Acharya said, adding that giving access to the location to any authority in the world can never make a passenger feel truly safe.

Understanding this, the founders pivoted. However, this time, they were hell-bent on delivering technology that not only gives coordinates but also context.

Another driving force was their deep grasp of the issue and a clear view of the hidden cracks where safety could shatter.

The founders assessed that safety risks can emerge from three key areas:

Driver-related: Fatigue, distraction, aggressive behaviour, or malicious intent.

Passenger-triggered: Harassment, property damage, or unruly behaviour.

Vehicle-related: Accidents, breakdowns, or third-party collisions.

In most cases, these incidents are never properly investigated or proven. They are often just “he said, she said” conflicts. As a result, there is no clear resolution, and the fleet operators ended up absorbing the financial or operational loss.

This triggered the Cautio founders to build a full-stack solution in-house — AI-powered cameras with driver and road monitoring, optional cabin views, GPS, and 4G connectivity; proprietary software to process and analyse behaviour; and a live command centre to oversee it all.

When Security Is Top Priority

A tech-loaded Cautio camera device is mounted on the windshield of a vehicle, with one lens facing the driver — tracking behaviour in real time to detect fatigue, distraction, aggression, or other risks — and another to face the road, monitoring driving patterns, incidents, and external hazards.

In addition, a third camera (optional) can be installed on the rear windscreen or inside the cabin. This is especially useful for buses, trucks, or autos that require passenger monitoring. Each unit is equipped with GPS and a 4G SIM card, allowing for precise location tracking and live data transmission.

“On top of this hardware, we’ve built our proprietary software that processes and analyses all incoming data. Our AI-powered system collects visual and location data, generates automatic alerts, tracks driver sentiment, and evaluates behaviour. At the heart of our operations is our live command centre, which acts as an extended security arm for fleet operators, verifying alerts and stepping in when necessary,” Acharya said.

Upon detecting anything unusual inside the vehicle, the driver receives an instant alert through the camera itself, while the incident data is transmitted to the command centre within six to seven seconds.

As the AI processing happens directly on the device through edge computing, the response is fast and doesn’t rely heavily on manual review. The outcome is a proactive safety network that focusses on preventing incidents, rather than merely recording them.

Cautio’s Next Big Fix

The startup’s customer base spans across the mobility sector, from premium operators such as Chauffeur, Cityflo, and Euro Cars to campus service providers like Indenter Mobility, which runs transport for institutions including IIT Bombay.

The company also works with transporters in tier II and tier III cities, logistics firms such as MD Movers and SteelHouse, and three-wheeler operators like Namma Yatri and 3D Three Core.

 

Pilots are also underway with Redbus.

At present, the company has under 5,000 devices live, with plans to deploy another 8,500 in the coming months, pushing its order book to approximately 15,000–16,000 units.

Cautio operates on a SaaS-based model, bundling software with hardware. Pricing scales with fleet size, ranging from INR 750 to around INR 1,900 per month.

“We have disciplined our pricing experiments to ensure as many people as possible can access its technology. By aligning costs with the earning potential of different vehicle categories like autos, we want to make our solution affordable and bite-sized,” Acharya said.

With its growing dataset, the company now plans to add insurance mapping. To date, the company has raised approximately $3.6 Mn, including $3 Mn in a recent round.

Over the next 12–18 months, Cautio plans to onboard at least 100 customers and deploy 20,000 devices. The company claims to have enabled 60 Lakh passengers to travel safely and now sets its sights on moving 60 Cr passengers.

It is on track to close the March quarter with at least $1 Mn in annual recurring revenue

Cautio is addressing a timely and expanding white space. The broader commercial telematics market in India was valued at $1.7 Mn in 2024 and is projected to nearly quadruple to $6.9 Bn by 2033, growing at a CAGR of around 16%.

While much of that growth currently targets GPS-centric fleet management and logistics, the video telematics market is on a fast upward trajectory. Amid this, can Cautio redefine road safety on chaotic Indian roads?

[Edited by Shishir Parasher]

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