Dr Narendra Jha
CEO @ EVA2Z Connect
Timeline
Background Before EVA2Z: I came up through retail and distribution, not through technology. That's shaped everything about how I build. Before Eva2z, I scaled Planet Retail to over 1,000 clients and later bootstrapped Gozipp to significant ARR — both businesses where success depended on understanding a customer who wasn't going to read your feature list, and on getting a product to them through channels nobody had mapped for you.
I spent those years learning how India actually buys: on trust, on price, on the word of someone they know. Every product decision at Eva2z is downstream of that.
The Origin Story: From a blocked car. Someone parks you in, and your only options are to shout in the parking lot or paste your personal phone number on your windscreen and accept the spam calls that follow. We built a QR sticker that routes a masked call to the owner — no number exposed on either side — and tested it in my own residential society in Noida.
What we found was bigger than the parking problem. People wanted to be reachable about their vehicle but not exposed by it, and that same consent principle — my data, my choice, my benefit — is exactly what India's motor insurance market is missing. The parking tag was the door. The reputation layer behind it is the building.
Founder Journey: I've built three companies across two decades, and each one taught me something the last one couldn't. At Planet Retail I learned distribution — how to scale to over a thousand clients when you don't have a brand name to lean on. At Gozipp I learned revenue discipline, bootstrapping it to meaningful ARR without outside capital.
Eva2z is where both lessons meet a problem I care about more than either: India has hundreds of millions of vehicles that technology has simply ignored. We started with EV scooters, pivoted through fleet SaaS, and landed on connected-vehicle intelligence — a free QR safety tag as the wedge, GPS telematics as the engine, and consented risk data as the moat. Still bootstrapped, still building.
"CEO at EVA2Z Connect"
Eva2z is a connected-vehicle intelligence platform making India's vehicles aware, trackable, and insurable. Eva2z Connect pairs a free QR-based SOS safety tag with affordable GPS/IoT telematics and a consent-first AI risk layer — turning everyday driving data into usable intelligence for vehicle owners, fleets, and motor insurers.
Timeline
Background Before EVA2Z: I came up through retail and distribution, not through technology. That's shaped everything about how I build. Before Eva2z, I scaled Planet Retail to over 1,000 clients and later bootstrapped Gozipp to significant ARR — both businesses where success depended on understanding a customer who wasn't going to read your feature list, and on getting a product to them through channels nobody had mapped for you.
I spent those years learning how India actually buys: on trust, on price, on the word of someone they know. Every product decision at Eva2z is downstream of that.
The Origin Story: From a blocked car. Someone parks you in, and your only options are to shout in the parking lot or paste your personal phone number on your windscreen and accept the spam calls that follow. We built a QR sticker that routes a masked call to the owner — no number exposed on either side — and tested it in my own residential society in Noida.
What we found was bigger than the parking problem. People wanted to be reachable about their vehicle but not exposed by it, and that same consent principle — my data, my choice, my benefit — is exactly what India's motor insurance market is missing. The parking tag was the door. The reputation layer behind it is the building.
Founder Journey: I've built three companies across two decades, and each one taught me something the last one couldn't. At Planet Retail I learned distribution — how to scale to over a thousand clients when you don't have a brand name to lean on. At Gozipp I learned revenue discipline, bootstrapping it to meaningful ARR without outside capital.
Eva2z is where both lessons meet a problem I care about more than either: India has hundreds of millions of vehicles that technology has simply ignored. We started with EV scooters, pivoted through fleet SaaS, and landed on connected-vehicle intelligence — a free QR safety tag as the wedge, GPS telematics as the engine, and consented risk data as the moat. Still bootstrapped, still building.
Top Advice
Sell before you build. Our biggest mistakes have all come from perfecting a product for a customer who was never going to buy it — and our best decisions came from a stranger telling us, bluntly, that the thing we'd built wasn't worth paying for. Get to that conversation as early as you can.
Second: distribution is the product. In India especially, the company that wins isn't the one with the better technology, it's the one that figured out how to reach the customer at a price they'll actually pay. And third — bootstrap longer than feels comfortable. Constraints force clarity that funding lets you avoid.
Wish I Knew Earlier
Killing ideas I was attached to. Eva2z didn't start as a connected-vehicle company — we came at it through EV scooters, then fleet SaaS, and both times the market told us something we didn't want to hear. The hard part isn't the pivot itself; it's admitting the previous eighteen months of conviction were expensive market research.
The second challenge is the one bootstrapping creates: every rupee we spend on the product is a rupee we don't spend on sales, and there's no funding round waiting to bail out a wrong call. That constraint has made us better, but I won't pretend it's been comfortable.