Blogs / lane
Category: Investment News
Lane Raises INR 8.5 Cr to Build Better Drivers, Not Just Licences
12 August 2026
Lane, the tech-enabled driving education and mobility platform founded by Samiksha Agarwal, has raised INR 8.5 crore in a pre-seed round
Lane, the tech-enabled driving education and mobility platform founded by Samiksha Agarwal, has raised INR 8.5 crore in a pre-seed round led by Kae Capital, with participation from DeVC, Antler India, Panthera Peak, and a group of angel investors.
A Different Premise
Driving education in India has run on the same playbook for decades: teach just enough to pass the RTO test, hand over a licence, and move on to the next student. Samiksha built Lane around a different premise - that the licence is the least interesting part of the journey. That reframe opens up a much bigger platform than a driving school: structured lessons, RTO and licensing support, and, increasingly, the services that surround a person's first car - insurance, ownership, and the sensor-based driver intelligence system Lane is building to understand driving behaviour at a level no instructor's clipboard ever could.
Every driving school in India chases the same thing: the licence. We're after something harder and far more valuable, a confident, competent driver.
The Numbers Behind the Thesis
In eighteen months, Lane has delivered over 30,000 hours of driving instruction to more than 3,100 learners - and the data inside those numbers is what makes this more than a services business. Seventy percent of Lane's customers already held a driving licence when they enrolled, and sixty percent expressed intent to buy their first car. People aren't just coming to Lane to pass a test they've already passed; they're coming because they don't yet trust themselves behind the wheel, which is a very different, much stickier problem to solve - and one that sits right at the moment a person starts thinking seriously about owning a car.
What's Next
This capital will go toward expanding Lane's instructor network across Bengaluru and other Tier I markets, accelerating the sensor-based driving behaviour technology, and building out the services layer around first-time car ownership. As backers of Lane, we're glad to keep supporting Samiksha as she builds the infrastructure for a driver-education category that, until now, nobody had bothered to modernise.