We're a team of Indian engineers, linguists and ex‑rideshare PMs who've spent the last year on the wrong end of every Google Maps reroute. Saarathi is what we wished existed when we were driving home.
Indian roads were never designed in straight lines. They grew the way our cities did — around a temple, a banyan, a market that has been there since 1937. We give directions by them. We've always done it that way.
And yet every map app, for twenty years, has shouted metres at us in a robot accent that doesn't quite get the pronunciation right.
We thought we could do better. Not by translating someone else's map into Hindi — but by building one from the way an Indian would actually tell another Indian to get there.
The result is Saarathi — the charioteer. Your guide on the road.
If we ever break one of these, send us an email. We mean it.
Eyes belong on the road, not the screen. If a feature needs a tap, it needs to also work by voice. No exceptions.
"Take left after the petrol pump" is one sentence in two languages. That's how Indians talk. That's how Saarathi listens.
"Right after the temple" is the unit of Indian navigation. We treat it as a first‑class citizen, not a fallback.
Voice on‑device. Locations encrypted end‑to‑end. We don't sell your data — because we built the product so we can't.
We're not chasing global. We're chasing India’s languages and India’s cities. The rest can wait.
If a decision is good for drivers and bad for our growth metric, the metric loses. We've already done this twice.
A small, India‑first team of engineers, linguists and field‑ops folks. We're keeping names off the website for now — write to us if you want to meet us.
A two‑person founding team — engineering and voice/speech. Names off the public site for now.
Native speakers for each beta language — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam — reading every transcript Saarathi trains on.
The folks walking inner lanes, mapping landmarks and building the routing layer Saarathi runs on.
A small field team running the limited beta — onboarding drivers, collecting feedback, fixing what breaks.
Most navigation apps are advertising businesses with a map attached. We're not. Here's what that means for your data.
Speech recognition runs on your phone. Audio never leaves your device unless you explicitly send us a bug report.
"Yahi waala tailor" is stored end‑to‑end encrypted. We can't read your saved places — and we built it so we can't.
Not to advertisers. Not to "anonymised data partners". Not to ride aggregators. Ever.
One tap, download every trip you've ever taken. Another tap, delete them all. Your data is your data.
We collect crash logs and aggregated routing metrics. No identifiers attached. Toggle it off if you want.
Hiring linguists, Android engineers, and field ops in three cities. Or just be a beta user — that's how the product gets better.