Two homegrown startups, DeepVisionTech and TensorGo Technologies, won awards at the Oracle APAC Startup Idol 2022. The competition, which concluded in January, had six companies from the Oracle for Startups Program showcasing their products and solutions. The judging panel comprised 50 analysts from Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Ecosystem, Omidyar, CapioIT, Telsyte, ADAPT and Greyhound. 

DeepVisionTech, which builds AI solutions for People with Disabilities (PwD), won the award for most creative startup pitch and best innovative solution. Hyderabad-based TensorGo Technologies won the Best Overall Pitch award.

Analytics India Magazine caught up with Jayasudan Munsamy and Arul Praveen T, co-founders of DeepVisionTech.AI and Srini Chilukuri, founder, TensorGo Technologies, to understand their solutions better and how the competition has turned things around for them.

Vision

Founded in 2019, DeepVisionTech became a social startup in mid-2020. “The communication barrier alone impacts millions of speech and hearing impaired (~466 million globally according to WHO). In India, lack of sign language literacy and job opportunities, access to essential services like healthcare and banking compounds the problem, leading to further social isolation,” said Munsamy.

The company has developed Let’sTalkSign tool to enable two-way communication on any device; interpretation of digital content; online shopping; access to banking and healthcare; upskilling etc. DeepVisionTech has partnered with several startups, academic institutions, NGOs, research institutes and incubators to improve the lives of the PwD community.

TensorGo is an enterprise-grade, low code deep learning and computer vision-based platform combining human intelligence with data-powered models to enable a smart future. The platform aims to tackle complex challenges in healthcare, manufacturing, education, and retail.

“Our platform can be leveraged to address critical issues including fraud detection for insurance companies and banks; assessing audience interaction, boredom, and interest levels of students by educators to make adjustments in training modules; the healthcare sector can use the technology to help in the diagnosis of dementia, depression, and other mental health issues. We also help retailers in assessing the intentions and emotions of shoppers and automakers to build solutions to prevent accidents by alerting drivers,” said Chilukuri. “Our low code/no-code platform, SOTA custom neural networks, easy API access, edge computing, and the flexibility to pay as per the API access and pricing give us an edge over the competition,” he added.

The journey

The awareness around assistive technology solutions has increased over the years. Currently, the Indian Sign Language dictionary is being created and promoted by the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Center. 

Arul Praveen said the light bulb came when the team figured out automatic video dataset creation for their sign recognition AI models, and eventually succeeded in automating signs creation for their app.

For Chilukuri, the conception of emYt was the turning point. “I still remember the day when we were working on a project to identify objects in images or videos about three years ago. One of my team members said, “how about installing video cameras outside the conference room as part of the project?” It was at that moment that the idea struck me – building a model that would identify a person’s emotions through their facial features, by simply looking at the video. I think that was truly a ‘eureka’ moment for us considering the idea triggered the birth of our revolutionary product, emYt,” said Chilukuri.

Oracle APAC Startup Idol

“We were surprised to know that we got selected as one of the six startups to participate in Oracle APAC Startup Idol 2022, out of several startups in the JAPAC region. For an early-stage startup like us, presenting our solutions to 50+ analysts around the region in one event is a dream come true. The competition gave us the exposure we needed but also helped us spread awareness and challenges the PwD community face on a daily basis. Overall, it was a great experience and we are looking forward to connecting with the analysts interested in our solutions. We also got connected with a few other startups in the JAPAC region and hopefully will get a chance to work together in the future,” said Munsamy. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is an integral part of their solutions, starting right from dataset creation to preprocessing to final model creation and deployment.

“In my presentation, I explained the roadmap of TensorGo and how our organisation plans to disrupt diverse domains through the power of Computer Vision. Winning the Best Overall Pitch award at the prestigious Oracle APAC Startup Idol 2022 was truly gratifying,” said Chilukuri.