Every day, thousands of trucks roll out of Indian depots before dawn, and every one of them carries the same quiet risk: a driver who blinks a second too long, glances at a phone, or misses the vehicle braking ahead. Novus Hi-Tech, a Gurugram company, has spent two decades building a watcher for that exact moment — a small AI camera on the dashboard that sees drowsiness, distraction and danger before they turn into an accident.
The company is Novus Hi-Tech Robotic Systemz, founded in 2004 by Anuj Kapuria. Its flagship product for fleets is Novus Safe Pro, an AI-enabled video telematics device that the company designs and manufactures in-house. The device watches the cabin and the road at the same time, and because the intelligence runs on the device itself — edge computing, in industry terms — it reacts in the moment instead of waiting for a distant server.
When the camera senses a hazard ahead, such as another vehicle closing in too fast, it sounds a local alert for the driver. When it senses drowsiness in the driver, it alerts both the driver and the fleet operator. The company says the on-board algorithm classifies each event from its training on Indian driving behaviour, so the system is tuned for the realities of Indian roads rather than imported assumptions. A companion server application gives fleet operators a live view of their vehicles, so a risky pattern can be coached the same day instead of discovered after a crash.
Already riding in thousands of vehicles
Safe Pro’s deployments read like a map of Indian mobility. The company says it is deploying the devices across Snap-E Cabs’ entire fleet of 1,200 electric cabs in Kolkata and Delhi-NCR, and counts Nayara Energy’s 5,000 trucks and Instant Transport’s 1,000 trucks among its heavy-vehicle customers. It is also putting the cameras in 200 buses of the Telangana State Road Transport Corporation, and has taken the technology overseas with a contract covering 1,100 Nestlé logistics trucks across Central and West Africa.
The same safety thinking reaches India’s mines. At the Bharat Mobility Global Expo in January 2025, Novus Hi-Tech unveiled a DGMS-compliant safety suite for Eicher Pro 8035 XM mining trucks, built with Eicher Trucks and Buses. The suite combines a driver monitoring system that watches for fatigue and inattention, a radar-based proximity warning system that calls out nearby obstacles and vehicles, and an Auto Dipper that drops the headlights to low beam automatically — small interventions that matter enormously in a mine at night.
From BharatBenz cabs to a full safety stack
Novus Hi-Tech’s road-safety story goes back further than Safe Pro. In 2018, its patented Novus Aware driver-state monitoring system — which reads eyes, face, head and gaze to judge whether a driver is safe to drive — began rolling out as standard equipment in premium heavy-duty variants of Daimler India Commercial Vehicles’ BharatBenz trucks, the first time an Indian company supplied its own ADAS technology to a German truckmaker. The company is also a supplier to Daimler India and Tata Motors, and says its solutions now span more than 25 design wins with vehicle makers, 20 vehicle models in production, 70,000-plus units installed and over 100 patents.
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The newest member of the family is Novus Safe Lite, a compact device that packs GPS tracking with 4G, forward-collision and pedestrian warnings, fatigue, distraction, phone-use, smoking and seatbelt detection, live video streaming and an SOS button into one unit. The company reports that fleets using its platform have seen critical safety violations fall by 70%, incident response speed up by 60% and on-road incidents drop by 40%. Alongside the hardware, the company has built Fleet GPT, a generative-AI fleet safety manager, and mobile robots for factory floors — the same sensing and autonomy skills, applied wherever machines and people work side by side.
The work earned Novus Hi-Tech a place among the 16 startups shortlisted from 980 applicants in Hyundai Motor India’s first Innovation Challenge, which closed with a Grand Pitch Day on 29 October 2026. Kapuria, who also leads a CII task force on road safety, has long argued that assistive technology is the fastest route to fewer crashes on Indian roads. With driver-state monitoring on its way to becoming a fixture of commercial vehicles, the little watcher on the dashboard is becoming part of how India drives — quietly, constantly, and always looking out for the person behind the wheel.
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