Every day, millions of Indians drive over the same pothole, past the same broken signal, through the same unmarked stretch of chaos — and nobody writes any of it down. The damage stays invisible until a tyre bursts, a claim is filed, or a life is lost. Nayan Technologies, founded by Jayant Ratti, asked a beautifully simple question: what if the cars themselves kept watch?
The answer is NAYAN Cam, an AI-powered dashcam that turns an ordinary vehicle into a rolling road inspector. Mounted on a windshield, it watches the road ahead and the driver behind the wheel at the same time, and its on-device intelligence turns what it sees into alerts and evidence in real time.
A watchman on every windshield
NAYAN Cam carries two 2-megapixel cameras with a wide 140-degree field of view — one facing the road, one facing the cabin — recording in Full HD and HD. But the cameras are only the eyes. The intelligence sits on the device itself: edge AI that detects events as they happen, without waiting for the cloud.
On the road, it spots traffic violations such as signal jumping and wrong-way driving, helmetless riders and seatbelt violations, and municipal trouble — potholes, broken bollards, dislodged pavers and damaged road surfaces. Inside the cabin, it watches for drowsiness, phone use and fatigue. For fleets, it adds live video streaming, GPS route playback, overspeeding alerts and harsh-braking detection, so a manager can see not just where a vehicle is, but how safely it is being driven.
From one camera to a city’s eyes
One dashcam watches one road. Thousands of them, moving through a city all day, watch all of it. That is the heart of Nayan’s idea: a decentralised network of vehicles — delivery fleets, buses, police vans, sanitation trucks and everyday drivers using the company’s app — that maps a city’s roads continuously, including the blind spots where fixed CCTV cameras never reach. The company says this approach lifts city coverage from a fraction of a percent with fixed cameras to as much as half the road network.
The numbers show the network already working at scale. The company’s site counts more than 1.9 million events captured, across more than 12 countries. A case study published by IndiaAI records 1,000 violations detected per hour and more than 50,000 catastrophic issues reported, and notes that the system supports more than 100 families, with people from lower-income groups earning a daily income as digital workers for the footage they contribute. By 2024, the company said more than 17,000 drivers across India had signed up to feed its AI engine, with 35 contracted customers and an order book worth Rs 35 crore.
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Already working for real cities
This is not a laboratory demo. Jhansi Smart City procured the NAYAN app through the national CIX portal, and events captured by drivers there flow into the city’s Integrated Command and Control Centre, where a ticket is generated and sent to the officer of the concerned department — garbage, potholes, encroachments and illegal parking, reported, routed and resolved through one pipeline. The company counts Delhi Police, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises among its government partners in India, and Dubai Police as an international partner.
The hardware itself is built for Indian conditions and Indian users. It runs on 4G or a phone hotspot, carries a 3,000 mAh battery that keeps it working for up to eight hours even with the engine off, stores up to 512 GB on an SD card with up to 30 days of tamper-free cloud recording, and includes an SOS button that calls and messages emergency contacts with the vehicle’s live location. An automatic privacy mode detects the owner’s face and pauses recording when the owner is driving. The device is designed, developed and manufactured in India, and the company says its servers and cloud storage are in India too.
The road ahead
The recognition has followed the results. Nayan won the TiE50 Top Startup award in Silicon Valley in 2025, the NXP Startup Impact Showcase in 2026, the NASSCOM Emerge 50 award in 2023 and the National Startup Award in 2021, and the company says it holds more than 70 patents across India, the United States and other countries. In October 2026, JSW MG Motor India named Nayan among the eight winners of its MG Developer Program Season 6, chosen from more than 130 applicants, opening the door to pilot projects with the automaker and its ecosystem partners.
It is a quietly radical idea: the safest roads may not come from more cameras on poles, but from the cars already driving on them. Every pothole logged is a repair waiting to happen; every violation caught is a habit waiting to change. With NAYAN watching, India’s roads are beginning to speak for themselves — and for the first time, someone is listening.
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