EaseMyTrip’s Prashant Pitti commits Rs 1 cr to solve Bengaluru traffic using AI, Google Maps

“I don’t want one more ‘Bengaluru Traffic Meme or Rant’. I want to fix it.”

By  Storyboard18| Jul 14, 2025 5:20 PM
Prashant Pitti, co-founder of EaseMyTrip.

EaseMyTrip and Optimo co-founder Prashant Pitti has pledged Rs 1 crore to identify and help fix the city’s worst traffic choke points using AI, Google Maps data and satellite imagery.

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The entrepreneur took to LinkedIn to share a personal account of being stuck in a Saturday night gridlock on Outer Ring Road (ORR), where he spent over 100 minutes at a single choke point with no traffic lights or traffic police presence. Rather than adding to the flood of memes and rants about Bengaluru’s crumbling traffic infrastructure, Pitti is proposing a data-backed, tech-first solution to tackle the issue head-on.

“I don’t want one more ‘Bengaluru Traffic Meme or Rant’. I want to fix it,” he wrote in the post.

The project will leverage Google’s recently launched “Road Management Insight”, a city-level dataset available via BigQuery, released in April 2025. Combined with Google Maps API, satellite imagery, and machine learning models, the initiative aims to map all major choke points in Bengaluru, including time-based congestion patterns, to provide actionable insights for city authorities.

Pitti is committing his Rs 1 crore pledge toward hiring 1–2 senior ML/AI engineers, funding Google Maps API usage, satellite data, GPUs and field pilot programs, making the entire project open-source, so other Indian cities can adopt it.

However, he is also urging government collaboration as a prerequisite to begin. The project will start once the Bangalore Traffic Police (BTP) or BBMP (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike) open access to their raw data or traffic APIs and formally designate a team committed to acting on the insights generated.

Pitti is mobilizing citizens and technologists to push the initiative forward. In his post, he called on citizens to tag officials from BTP and BBMP, ML/AI professionals to comment “IN” if they wish to contribute part-time and regular commuters to amplify the message via shares and comments.

“Bengaluru is India’s tech future; and the people making it happen deserve MUCH better,” he said.

The move comes amid growing public frustration over the city's daily traffic snarls, with commute times often stretching beyond 2–3 hours for distances under 10 km.

First Published onJul 14, 2025 4:49 PM

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