Sharmin Ali was working with a technology company and dealing with Fortune 500 companies in the USA when she realised that even large corporations are poor at communication. With a strong interest in writing and reading, she understood how we communicate is crucial to making marketing decisions. “Here is where I stepped in with Instoried,” said Ali.

Founded in 2019, Bengaluru-based Instoried helps large companies make their marketing and communications content more human with a data-driven, scalable and repeatable approach using AI. Its deep-tech platform analyses and predicts the emotional quotient, tonality and relevance of written content across formats like blogs, articles, social media posts.

In the last two years, the startup has helped numerous enterprises and individuals create emotionally engaging content and improving ROI. 

Behind Instoried

With its augmented writing platform, Instoried helps predict the success of the content before publishing it, hence improving customer interest and engagement. The AI-driven tool enables optimising emotions of the written content with smart recommendations in real-time. 

“At Instoried, we have built deep learning-based natural language processing systems to help optimise content. We are aiming to build a highly inclusive workplace for people of all backgrounds and genders who can help us grow,” Ali told Analytics India Magazine. She is responsible for driving strategy, leadership and sales as the founder and CEO at Instoried. Sutanshu Raj, who takes care of the startup’s tech aspect, later joined her as the CTO. 

As Ali likes to call it, Instoried is at the cusp of Sharmin’s love for storytelling and a background in technology. 

Tech Behind Instoried

Instoried is an AI-driven deep-tech startup that works on making real-time analysis and suggestions to enhance the written content. It does so by using a data-driven approach in its proprietary AI technology to make these predictions. The AI algorithms are trained on an accumulated data set from 5 million data points to give smart recommendations. Instoried’s APIs can be easily integrated into any platform that brands may already be using.  

Apart from its proprietary AI technology, it uses neuromarketing principles to offer smart recommendations to dial up (or down) a particular emotion in the content. “As the name suggests, neuromarketing is marketing to the brain,” said Ali. It works on the fact that emotions drive consumer decision making more often than logic. “We help marketers create content that is more human and filled with empathy, that it becomes easier to resonate with their audiences,” she further added. 

Explaining how the AI solution works, Ali said that as one creates content, the tool dynamically analyses it and displays the text’s tone and emotion. On clicking on a particular tone or emotion, the tool highlights all the words, excluding that particular tone or emotion. Upon hovering the cursor over a particular word, it gives multiple recommendations that are both semantically and contextually relevant, thereby enhancing the content’s empathy. Companies have used it for increasing the opening rate of email, creating engaging captions for social media, plagiarism check, analysing the mood of the customer, and more. 

Ali said the tech is completely proprietary. “We haven’t used any of the open-source APIs available out there. We have used 7 million data points in-house for building our proprietary dataset. The entire code has been built in-house, and I’m happy to tell you that our analysis and recommendations are completely state-of-the-art and have the highest levels of accuracy and effectiveness,” she added.

So far, Instoried’s customers have witnessed up to a 3X increase in incoming leads per post and a 2X rise in ROI in less than six months. Customers have used it across industries such as e-commerce, FMCG, media and more. 

Growth Story

“Our customers love us,” shared an elated Ali. Having started shipping in April last year, Instoried has witnessed a hockey stick curve in the growth cycle despite the lockdown. “In less than ten months of selling, we have already received such amazing customer feedback,” she said. 

Ali said they have an exciting blueprint for 2021. “We are launching our own keyboard for both Android and IOS devices that can be used on any platform. Imagine chatting with your loved one and being able to gauge the temperature of your chat, and also getting smart recommendations in real-time,” said Ali. She believes this is the future of chat, and there are endless possibilities that Instoried is eager to tap.