In 2011, Vantage Circle was just a seed of an idea; Partha Neog and Anjan Pathak were still in school. But the duo kept the coals alive and finally succeeded in setting up their own business.
With over two decades of experience in the IT and technology industries and seeing employees’ struggles up close, the duo wanted to make a difference in their lives. Vantage Circle is a one-stop employee engagement platform designed to transform the way people connect and feel. With a suite of solutions, the startup has improved the workforce’s productivity through compelling employee experiences.
The Delhi-based startup leverages cloud technology to offer comprehensive solutions for the clients. Analytics India Magazine spoke to the co-founders to know more about the startup and how technologies like artificial intelligence give them a competitive edge.
AI At Vantage Circle
The COVID pandemic has prompted companies to tap AI and other technology to bridge the gap between work and wellness. Vantage Circle provides solutions for organisations looking to improve workplace wellness through a holistic approach.
Vantage Circle’s machine learning models act as key drivers to automate the entire employee engagement process. According to Neog, The company’s flagship product, Vantage Fit, is an all-in-one corporate wellness application that boosts employee productivity and enhances employee wellness. With a high accuracy model, organisations can track employees’ mood, calorie intake, heart rate, and integrate the application with different wearable devices.
Neog said managers even have the flexibility to reward employees with fitness points, customisable badges, and virtual trophies. Vantage Fit comes with a dashboard feature that allows managers to create and modify the various aspects of the workplace wellness program. It also provides real-time insights into the employees’ engagement levels, which makes activity tracking hassle-free.
To facilitate this, Vantage Circle has developed a recommendation model that handles implicit and explicit data. The model is curated using the data of users’ interaction with the system. This enables quick access to the deals and offers based on the preferences of the user. Further, a text-prediction model has been implemented in the ‘Employee Reward and Recognition’ platform, where the machine learning algorithm auto-completes the organisation managers’ appreciation message for their colleague. “We use a fine-tuned GPT-2 model in order to predict the sentence,” added Neog.
Vantage Circle’s solutions also come with a rule-based model of graphs that gives higher priority to the feeds that belong to the same department or users with an interaction history.
A critical project within Vantage Circle is the ‘employee mail recommendation’. “We do this to designate and utilise the quarterly allotment of the financial plan. Within ten days of non-recommendation, an automated mail is sent to the managers to make sure that the deserving employees are recognised,” said Neog.
Another AI application is in ‘exercise detection,’ where a PoseNet model using a mobile phone camera detects whether a person is doing any exercise. The model assesses human posture by identifying a rundown of key points from the posture and distinguishes 17 central issues.
Vantage Circle is actively using Python language and an open-source Redis database. Further, the startup uses a Docker container for all its projects and has a separate pipeline inside each docker container to handle the data preprocessing and model training. The startup uses Flask, a micro web framework written in Python, to host the API. Other commonly used ML libraries are SKLearn, Numpy, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Pandas, Keras, Matplotlib.
Growth Plan
Vantage Circle was bootstrapped. “We have taken less than one crore in external funding from people who believed and trusted in our goals. This gave us the luxury to experiment with products, marketing strategies, and overall dynamics of the organisation, which later proved to be crucial for the success of the company,” said Pathak.
Considering the startup carries out most of its operations from a small city, it faces hurdles like fast recruitment, skilled hiring, and finding suitable candidates. Another critical challenge for the startup was to keep its team motivated and maintain high morale.
“We managed to resolve these issues and switch to a virtual recruiting approach and providing remote work opportunities,” said Pathak. “We started to get an incredible number of talented individuals applying to work at Vantage Circle as the popularity of our flexible working arrangements and a good work culture gained the right amount of buzz.”
Vantage Circle is seeking to cement its market base to appeal to diverse demographics. With improved AI and automation, the startup will extend its efforts to newer countries requiring a comprehensive employee engagement solution. “Our immediate plan is to remove any potential communication barriers by incorporating multiple language accessibility into our platform,” concluded Neog.
