"Imagine, if cities learn from themselves and then planned themselves accordingly," exclaimed Mohak Bhambry, Co-founder, Smart Cities Wheel, in an interaction with Sujata Sangwan.
Smart Cities Wheel was founded in 2016 with a soul mission to accelerate the advent of developing new age with intelligent Smart Cities. Based at the heart of India-Indore (Madhya Pradesh), the company was co-founded by Mohak Bhambry (Hardware Engineer with interests and passion in Artificial Intelligence) who is the chief inventor of the technology too, and Dr. Shashank Khurana who handles the product, was a Doctoral Research fellow in Space Sciences in the University of Tokyo and currently an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at B.I.T.S. (Pilani) – Dubai, bringing the product with academic avenue along with connecting them to Dubai Smart City business. Siddharth Rajhans is business enabler for the company. His rich experience in Silicon Valley, current work profile at Apple, his presence in the startup ecosystem and his work as a pioneer of Outernet technology will help the company gain traction and prominence.
Smart Cities Wheel is a patent-underway 12-Key Performance Indicator based data visualization platform, that helps urban planners, city stakeholders & Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) to build, design & plan smart cities using Artificial Intelligence. The city will be calibrated quarterly based on these performance indicators and in case on any repercussions the tool will provide necessary “call for actions” in order to maintain the “smartness” of the cities. The KPIs are – Economy, Mobility, Infrastructure, Awareness, Quality of Life(QoL), Technology, Smart City Agents(People), Smart Governance, Healthcare, Waste Management, Energy & Innovation.
All 12-KPIs are with quantitative and qualitative data parameters indexed to them that governs and runs the performance of the entire city. Now, every three months, the city will be analyzed and calibrated in order to give a future performance measure of cities using Artificial Intelligence.
Under their infrastructure KPI, they demoed an Augmented Reality app for urban planners, wherein they augmented –The Rajwada, proposed heritage site for Smart City Indore proposal.
Smart Cities Wheel is currently, bootstrapped and they are looking forward for raising capital once they launch their first pilot.
The startup monetises using two streams. One is Yearly licensing fee for the performance driven data visualization platform, which will be based on the demographic of the cities and the performance indicator chosen by cities. Secondly, Augmented Reality in-app purchases for premium city and urban planning features (like – encroachment notifications, dimension tracking, area planning, etc.)
Currently, the startup plans to pilot their model with immediate 4-Key Performance Indicator in 3 cities for the first operational year. In the coming 5 years they want to develop 10 smart cities with their model. They even have a global cities market track around their roadmap that could give the business a much-required overseas push right from the beginning.
When asked about the market size and opportunity, Mohak Bhambry said, “Smart City market is huge and it is expected to have lot of competitors for the same. But, we dwell upon AI based performance driven Smart City planning & management tool, which is something currently not available in the market that is the dire need, giving an edge.”
“INR 7,016 Cr (USD 120 Billion) is the proposed budget allocation for 150 Smart Cities in India by Union & Finance Ministry. Out of which INR 9.4 Billion (USD 140 Million) will be used for the first phase of the project (ICT as well as Urban Infrastructure development). The market size of the world for smart cities is USD 480 Billion and by 2025 it will be around USD 780 Billion,” added Mohak.
