Bangalore-headquartered AI startup Absentia has bagged INR 8 crores in a pre-series A round of funding from Exfinity Venture Partners, former Infosys executives V Balakrishnan and Mohandas Pai, Deepak Ghaisas and Girish Paranjpe. Reportedly, the startup is using the funds to build their product, dubbed Norah AI, an AI engine that can create interactive content for games with minimal human intervention.
Kick-started in 2015 by BITS Pilani-Goa undergraduate students, Shubham Mishra, Vrushali Prasade, and Harikrishna Valiyath, who wanted to better the idea of Oculus, VR headgear, the founders made their own product called Tesseract. The start-up was targeting the global VR market predicted to hit $3.2 billion this year.
Now, Norah AI platform is aimed at the media and entertainment sector and is billed to be the world’s first auto content-generation platform, the founders claimed reportedly. “Over the past few months, our team has successfully monetized the platform in the area of virtual reality , augmented reality and image processing across select sectors,” said Absentia cofounder Shubham Mishra.
What Norah AI can do essentially is: Create a completely new set of interactive content for arcade games, casual games, puzzles, animation and graphics. Under the hood,the interactive media engine platform comprises vast neural network, that can be used by interactive content designers to create games, GIFs and animations in a short span of time. According to Mishra, the team has claimed a first mover advantage in the area of high end gaming market.
