The Indian AI startups space is booming and now encompasses various avenues such as computer vision, self-driving, retail, audio production and innovating e-commerce platforms, among others. This year we have come with a list of yet another 10 awesome startups that are revolutionising the field of artificial intelligence with their impressive technologies. These startups are about two to three years old and are already beginning to show some remarkable developments in the field of AI.
Please note that this is not a ranking and the startups are listed in alphabetical order.
1| Comsense
Founded in 2014 by a team of ex-IBMers, Comsense has grown into a global marketing technology in a relatively short span. With a state-of-the-art development centre in Pune and offices in the US, Germany, South Africa, and Singapore, they are enabling businesses to use cognitive technology to do better data-driven marketing.
Their flagship AI product DataSense felicitates bi-directional exchange of data between the Marketing Automation Platform and the organisations legacy application’s data sources. The client gets a more complete picture of their customers’ behaviour in real-time so they can act faster and create more personalised messages to improve the engagement. With a team of 30, they have been working towards comprehending the challenges associated with improving customer experience and bridging the technology and business gap through the power of marketing automation and predictive analytics.
The Founding Team: It was co-founded by Sagar Babar (CEO & Co-founder), Biju Nambiar (Co-founder & Sales Director), Aniket Neurgaonkar (Co-founder & Marketing Director), Vineet Ladhania (Co-founder & CFO), Samarth Malik (Co-founder & Director – EMEA).
2| DeepSight Labs
DeepSight AI Labs was launched in 2018 with an aim to come up with a way for AI to solve the security and safety problems that human face. With an employee strength of 12, they have been able to accomplish tremendous growth. They have developed “SuperSecure Computer Vision Platform”, a smart video surveillance retrofit solution based on artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies.
SuperSecure+ adds intelligence to existing or new CCTV and drones to detect objects or potential threats such as intrusion, people with helmets, masks, weapons, ANPR, face recognition, fire etc. It can also develop custom object detection to suit specific requirements. It is a universally compatible retrofit platform that works with any CCTV system to make into a smart surveillance system. This computer vision platform can analyse multiple live and recorded video feeds from CCTVs, enhance the quality of videos in real-time, and prevent incidents such as robberies, among others. It is being used in verticals such as banking, e-surveillance, smart cities, oil & gas, retail, media, transportation and others.
The Founding Team: Satya Tadimeti (CEO), Nishant Veer (CTO), Rakesh Channaiah (COO).
3| Deepsync
Founded in December 2018, Deepsync was started with an aim to create AI that augments human potential and not just automates them. They believe in combining human creativity and AI’s promise of efficiency. Voice came as a natural focus for them as they saw the need to improve audio production. It is now completely changing audio production with the use of AI.
As India is witnessing an increase in the vernacular content, audio remains a big focus. It is not feasible for humans to scale recording manually, also, recording today is a tiresome and costly process, requiring multiple stakeholders. Their AI is making recording audio as easy as typing a document. Their AI learns hundreds of features regarding human voice such as accent and speed of speaking to bring high-quality content which is truly scalable at a fraction of time and cost. Deepsync’s technology supports all major Indian languages and creates new content in near real-time.
Having raised a pre-seed round from Hong-Kong based Zeroth.ai, they are currently expanding their technology team and hiring for engineers.
The Founding Team: It was founded by Ishan Sharma (CEO) and Rishikesh (CTO & Head of AI Research). They come with an extensive joint background working with voice technology, AI and blockchain research.
4| Infilect
Based in Bengaluru, Infilect is a B2B SaaS startup helping global retail brands with visual data and insights from retail stores. Every retail brand in the world has so far relied on Point-of-Sale (POS) data from retail outlets to understand their sales and marketing performance. However, POS data does not capture what is happening in retail stores, how are customers interacting with a brand’s product and why a brand’s products are not selling. Infilect provides digital “eyes” to every brand to know exactly what is happening in every retail outlet.
It is doing so by using advanced deep learning and AI algorithms, which companies are using to significantly improve marketing ROI and revenue. Its deep learning architectures is fine-tuned for retail domain and also uses computer vision technology to bring better results. It currently serves several top brands in FMCG/CPG, Telco, Consumer Durables and more.
The Founding Team: It was founded in 2015 by Anand Prabhu Subramanian and Vijay Gabale with a vision to be the best visual intelligence provider to the retail industry. They are currently a team of 14 people and are bootstrapped.
5| Marax
Marax is building Mars, the world’s first privacy-first discount optimisation platform. It is a SaaS tool that enables growth teams to run optimised discount campaigns for their users, driven by a budget — in a ‘privacy-first’ world — across their devices, across the lifecycle. It works by allocating just the right discount to each user to nudge them towards completing a transaction by using anonymised data.
Mars uses the latest advancements in deep reinforcement learning to recommend optimised discounts which can then further be used for improving the discounting experience or marketing. Since the awareness around privacy is increasing every day, it is important to use technologies that make the above possible without invading an individual’s privacy – MARS does exactly that.
Founded in 2016, Marax AI has the sole mission of solving churn for consumer internet business. It is currently being used by companies such as Rapido to optimise the discount experience for their users. The startup is funded by Zeroth.AI, HK and SmartStart fund, US.
The Founding Team: It was founded by Raman Shrivastava, Prateek Gupta, and Sumant US.
6| Quadrical.Ai
Founded in September 2018, it is one of the youngest startups in the list. They identify how customers are currently using data and analysing their success metrics, before proposing a way to integrate their ‘best-in-class’ AI-generated guidance. The startup combines data science into solutions which are in-depth, scale seamlessly and follow strict testing. It enables effortless integration with a customised API. Quadrical.Ai also has products to maximise profits, forecast outcomes, personalise recommendations and control risk through anomaly detection.
They have around 14 members in their AI team evenly split between offices in Waterloo, Ontario and Gurgaon. The startup has raised $550,000 in the founder funding round. The startup pioneers in carrying out short term predictions in avenues such as price, demand, sales and others for their e-commerce customers.
The Founding Team: It was founded by Sharat Singh and Dr Hugh Hind. Others in the founding team include Vishal Arya, VP Platforms, Kitty Chachra, VP, Marketing, Communications and Yash Chhikara, VP Product, Business Development. “Made in Waterloo,” it came into existence when Dr Hugh Hind met Sharat Singh and realised that they shared a similar vision. Both had a fundamental belief in AI’s ability to transform business — while Hugh approaches AI from a strategic and mathematical frame, Sharat brings an engineering and execution perspective.
7| Signzy
A fintech startup, Signzy offers digital onboarding solutions for banks, NBFCs and other financial institutions. Their AI product solution focuses on two major areas in the BFSI industry — the KYC process and back-end operations such as REALKYC, Algorithmic Risk Intelligence (ARI) and Digital Contracts. Through its AI-based decision engines and back-office tools, Signzy is drastically reducing the customer onboarding process and have insulated banks from human frauds. With years of R&D into their computer vision tools, they have been able to recognise documents and detect forgery. They currently have an employee strength of 75 and have received initial funding from Kstart, a venture of Kalaari Capital. They have also raised Series A round of $3.6 Million from Kalaari Capital and Stellaris Venture Partners.
Signzy was founded in 2015 inspired by founders’ experiences of dealing with banks as individuals and companies in previous startups. As the banks were going digital banks were spending huge resources in doing functions such as customer onboarding, back-office operations which they felt could be automated using AI.
The Founding Team: Signzy was co-founded by Ankit Ratan, Ankur Pandey and Arpit Ratan. While Ankit and Ankur both are IIT graduates and bring the expertise of data science and app-development, Arpit is a corporate lawyer who brings in the knowledge of financial regulations and expertise of working with statutory bodies, to the table.
8| Vedalabs
Vedalabs is a retail analytics platform that allows retailers to analyse in-store traffic and business metrics associated with it, thereby presenting real-time business insights to retailers. It was founded in January 2018 by a group of technology folks hailing from institutes like CMU, IIT, NIT, Manchester Institute, etc. with a combined experience of over 40 years in the AI domain.
Vedalabs was conceptualised with a primary aim to make everyday CCTV cameras smart as the founders felt that while there are millions of CCTVs deployed across the country, there is no proactive mechanism that monitors it. Hence they decided to use AI and machine learning to build a system that can do that. They currently have 12 employees and with the recent funding that they raise, they aim to scale their team and current pipeline to establish market dominance.
The Founding Team: Veer Mishra, Saurabh Shandilya, Vivek Singh, Saurabh Yadav
9| Wobot
Wobot.ai is an AI-powered computer vision SaaS that helps hospitality, food and retail businesses monitor operations. This plug-and-play tool connects to any existing CCTV or other forms of cameras and helps detect and track anomalies in standard operating procedures (SOPs) including keeping a check on food quality parameters. It currently offers various modules including hygiene, food safety pilferage and customer experience.
Wobot can detect everything from people cooking with or without hair nets, packaging with or without gloves, whether safety attire or a uniform is worn or not, mopping of floors, raw material quality, number of transactions at a restaurant and even whether guest interactions happen as per SOP or not. It is revolutionising the video analytics function and solving the biggest problem of monitoring operations across a vast setup. It currently has over 2000 installations and some of the partners are IRCTC, CultFit, Barista, Travel Food Services, EatFit, Blue Tokai and others.
The team size of Wobot currently is over 35 with people across design, engineering, data tagging and customer support. They recently raised a round from a few well-known angels and are now planning Series A round over the next quarter.
The Founding Team: It was founded in 2017 by Adit Chhabra (CEO), Tapan Dixit (COO), and Tanay Dixit (CPO). Pranav Anand (CCO) also joined the ranks soon. Together they bring experience in food, hospitality, retail, compliance and have built products using ML and DL in the past.
10| Zappy.AI
Zappy has developed Cognitive Robotic Process Automation Software which is 30x faster, easier and cost-effective compared to traditional automation software. With their two product lines Zappy and Zappy Analytics, they are driving the world’s fastest automation creation software that can observe user actions on desktop and creates automation within minutes. Their advanced algorithms are based on a combination of supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement machine learning giving Zappy the ability to automate the task by observing people at their work computers.
It uses AI to discover all business processes in an organisation that can be optimised and offers unique automated solutions. Zappy Analytics collects, analyzes and process data from every employee in the organisation and uses machine learning capabilities to present an analysis of the employees’ time spent on various applications over the entire Business Process to the employer. They currently have ongoing pilots and implementations with large European banks, conglomerates, telecoms and clients across the UK, India, Japan, France and Poland.
The Founding Team: It was founded in 2017 by Ambuj Agrawal (CEO) with an aim to allow employees to get rid of their repetitive tasks. The startup has received several grants such as from NetApp Innovation, Ministry of Economy Luxembourg and Google.
