The startup focuses on developing self-driving technology for unstructured environment conditions and India's road network is full of such environments. In the thick of it is founder and CEO Sanjeev Sharma, whose interest in the field of robotics was born way back in 2009, when he watched the videos of Team MIT at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. With time, he knew that he wanted to hone in on research to enable autonomous driving in the most difficult traffic environmental scenarios, but it wasn't until 2014, when Sharma deferred his PhD at the University of Massachusetts for a year, that he established Swaayatt Robots. Fast forward eight years and, despite knowing much more about autonomous mobility than in 2014, safety continues to be a huge challenge. Even before we think of the purchasing and operational cost, we're quite some time away from solving for driver safety in an uncontrolled and unstructured environment -- but Swaayatt Robots is trying to fix that.

Sanjeev is a recipient of the 40 Under 40 Data Scientists award, at the Machine Learning Dev Summit for his research in autonomous tech.