Lane (inlane.in) is building the driver intelligence infrastructure underpinning the next generation of driving education and vehicle ownership in India. Kae Capital led the round, with participation from DeVC, Antler India and Panthera Peak.
National — Lane , a tech-enabled driving education and mobility platform, has raised ₹8.5 crore in a round led by Kae Capital, with participation from DeVC, Antler India, Panthera Peak as well as prominent Angels.
The company is tackling a problem India has left unsolved for decades: the absence of structured, high-quality driver education at scale.
The stakes are high. More than 1.7 lakh people die on Indian roads every year, roughly twenty every hour. Most Indian drivers learn informally, from family or friends, and the formal test itself is run at 10-15 km/h on a fixed track, nothing like real traffic. India has about 1% of the world’s vehicles but accounts for nearly 11% of its road deaths. The biggest gap is the near-total absence of a rigorous, accountable system for teaching people to drive
The insight behind the category
Lane was founded by Samiksha Agarwal in 2025, who spent her career in VC and finance but always came back to one passion: driving. That led her to a simple observation — India has 250 million licence holders, but most were never actually taught to drive.
“Every driving school in India chases the same thing: the licence,” Samiksha says. “We’re after something harder and far more valuable — a confident, competent driver. Confidence behind the wheel is a life skill: built once, carried forever.”
In 18 months, Lane has delivered 30,000+ hours of instruction to more than 3,100 learners, making it one of the largest structured driver-education platforms in the country. Nearly 70% of its customers already held a licence when they signed up — proof of the gap between getting a licence and knowing how to drive.
Lane’s safety-first method was developed over 400+ hours of pilot classes, with input from automobile researchers. Instructors are held to the same bar: every partner is assessed across 15 driving parameters, including simulated lessons. Those who qualify can earn ₹80,000–90,000 a month, working within micro-markets close to home.
From education to ownership
Education is the entry point, not the endgame. Lane has begun offering car purchases, RTO services and more to its learners — with nearly 60% expressing intent to purchase their first car
“We’re not in the business of repeat enrollments,” Samiksha says. “We’re in the business of building trust that lasts well beyond the last driving class.”
The bigger bet: driver intelligence at scale
Longer term, Lane is building an AI-powered, automotive-grade system for the full mobility journey — with education as the entry point and driver intelligence as the long game.
Sunita Viswanathan, Partner, Kae Capital: “What convinced us wasn’t just the size of the category, but where it sits in a person’s life, the moment you learn to drive is the moment you start thinking about owning, insuring, and building a life around a car. Samiksha found the right entry point, and she’s exactly the founder to build from it.”
At its core is a sensor-based system that turns every driving session into behavioural data, building a living driver profile for each learner. For insurers, that means pricing risk on how someone actually drives, not on static categories. For manufacturers, it means comparable, real-world data on how vehicles perform. And for the country, it means a genuine picture
of how India’s 250 million licence holders drive — the foundation for incentive systems that reward safe behaviour and give policymakers something enforcement alone never could.
A partner to India’s road safety mission
India’s governments have put road safety firmly on the national agenda — from mandatory highway ambulances to Good Samaritan protections. What no public institution can build alone is the on-the-ground education, instructor accountability, and behavioural data that turn that intent into outcomes. Lane wants to be the engine that delivers it on the ground.
Use of funds
The ₹8.5 crore will be deployed across three priorities:
- Geographic expansion — scaling Lane’s instructor network across Bengaluru and into other Tier 1 cities
- Sensor technology — accelerating the build-out of Lane’s proprietary driving behaviour system”
- Car ownership — building the downstream infrastructure that takes a confident driver through their first car purchase
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