Aether Energy
Swapnil Jain and Tarun Mehta became fascinated by mobility solutions for India’s fast-growing economy while studying in Chennai, a cosmopolitan city on the Bay of Bengal. At IIT Madras, India’s top-ranked engineering university, the friends immersed themselves in experimental vehicle projects that helped them win elite auto industry jobs. But they soon felt drawn to a bigger mission than climbing the corporate ladder.
“We were itching to do something different,” says Swapnil. “We wanted to explore the possibilities of electric vehicles and how they can be developed to empower India.”
Swapnil and Tarun launched Ather Energy from a belief that electric scooters could help drive the growth narrative of a nation of 1.3 billion on the path to middle-income status. But they knew that could only be part of the picture: “As a startup, we have to build something that’s redefining the segment,” says Swapnil.
For the partners, segment redefinition meant inventing an intelligent electric scooter, powered by AI and IoT, that would enable people to navigate the chaotic maze of Indian life. Yet with a small team of engineers and limited resources, they needed more than innovation smarts to succeed. They linked their big idea to Google Cloud, confident that Cloud IoT Core and BigQuery would give them freedom to buckle down to the task of creating unique mobility solutions.
“That was the entry into Google Cloud,” says Swapnil, “and then we just went with everything else on top of it, since the solutions can be easily deployed and scaled up."
Driving in India can be tricky, with roads cratered with potholes, streets with no names, chronic traffic congestion, confusing city layouts, and free-for-all driving. Swapnil and Tarun had a vision to tackle such problems with an electric scooter that constantly evolves based on road data, driving habits, and vehicle performance.
But Ather Energy’s team of 100 employees had more on its to-do list than building intelligent applications. They also needed to design a brand new lithium-ion battery capable of 75km distances, develop a motor powerful enough to endure Indian roads, and create a touchscreen dashboard that would survive intense heat, dust storms, and road vibrations. With such a set of challenges, Ather Energy didn’t have time to spare on developing data analytics or maintaining IT infrastructure. By turning to Google Cloud, Ather Energy was able to focus on creating a machine for India’s future, while entrusting the big data processing to Cloud IoT Core and BigQuery.
“We wanted a solution that could be put on the market by a really small team,” says Swapnil. “We have a lot of data that needs to be analyzed at a very rapid pace so BigQuery was the most obvious choice. With Google Cloud, I have a world-class product and don't have to build a team for it. It means I can go back to focusing on my core task, which is the application.”
The Ather 450, Ather Energy’s premium product, derives uniqueness from 43 IoT sensors fitted into each scooter, enabling it to obtain granular information on every aspect of the driver experience. The deployment of so many sensors, says Swapnil, was made possible by the virtually unlimited computing power of Google Cloud.
“We knew that Cloud IoT Core and BigQuery would let us crunch data from 43 sensors at a really fast pace,” he says. “Otherwise we would have been limited to using 10 or 15 sensors; that was the limitation of the previous platform.”
The synergies between Ather Energy and Cloud IoT solutions resulted in a unique mobility platform for India and beyond. With Google Maps Platform-enabled navigation as a core feature, Ather Energy’s platform capabilities are amplified. The Ather 450 performs predictive maintenance to fix problems before they happen, structures electricity use for big cost savings, analyzes traffic and road conditions for optimal route options, and alerts riders to unoccupied electricity stations in the Ather Grid, the startup’s charging infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the aggregated data from all scooters on the road is providing key intelligence for Swapnil and Tarun to develop future models based on customer habits and requirements. The company, for example, can read exactly how far customers are riding every day to inform decisions regarding driving range in product development.
“We’re churning out a few hundred megabytes of data every day, on every vehicle,” says Swapnil. “With that sort of data, and a few thousand vehicles on the road, we’re doing things which would have been impossible without Google Cloud.”
Critically, Google Cloud software and architecture solutions have enabled Ather Energy’s team to deploy microservices in real time at a constant rate so it can deliver more frequent monthly platform updates that help capitalize on what a connected vehicle can do. Innovative updates such as "guide-me-home" lights and real-time ride/energy efficient indicators help bolster Ather Energy’s competitive position.
“One of the big things about having connected vehicles is that you don't want to roll out applications in a six-month time frame,” explains Swapnil. “You want to be rolling out an update every month. And that means our focus has to be on application development and not on infrastructure and maintenance of any sort.”
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