2016-founded Gurugram-based Adloid has been powering retailers, including the likes of Tata Motors, Asian Paints and Tanishq, with augmented reality(AR) and deep technology to provide better customer experiences. According to Founder and CEO Kanav Singla, the 55-employee strong Adloid team has helped retailers, in the automobile, home décor, eyewear, jewellery and cosmetics industries, helping them reduce returns by 18 percent. The startup enables companies to augment trails and product catalogues, offering a close-to-real-life shopping experience. The AR technology is tailor-made for every client, allowing access through all devices– smartphones, tables and desktops.
An alumnus of IIT Delhi, Kanav is also a Strategy Consultant at SAP.io and matter expert at Federation of Automobiles Dealers Association. Along with Kanav, Shorya Mahajan and Prashant Sinha have co-founded the company.
Excerpts from the interview with Kanav:
AIM: What problem is your company addressing? How?
Kanav Singla: The following pain-points are validated by our business model:
- The world is going virtual and powering immersive experiences is the key. According to Gartner, more than 100 million plus users would be shopping in AR by 2022. Adloid’s AR platform allows businesses to actively engage their customers and go beyond the limitations of their physical reality to let customers experience products as they would in a real setup.
- Secondly, a virtual world needs smartphones for scale and democratisation, and AR is the answer. Adloid is removing bulky hardware and clunky software from AR, making it adaptable to various use-cases and accessible to all using the capabilities of smartphones at scale. Our solution has the potential to reach more than 2.9 billion smartphones globally.
- The AR industry faces the problems of cracking scale, quality, and compatibility in a single package. While many existing players are taking a sector-specific route, they are only focusing on specific parts of the value chain and not catering to the whole workflow. Adloid with its web-based proprietary platform is solving for the complete workflow, tackling the problems of scale, rendering quality on web and mobile, and compatibility in smartphones as our USP.
AIM: What are your flagship products?
Kanav Singla: Adloid has created a deeptech AR platform with low-code or no-code integration. Using our platform, many brands and enterprises today are transitioning from digital to virtual and immersive online experiences for their community. We are catering to the automotive, home decor, consumer electronics or durables, and lifestyle industries. As we speak, we are also witnessing adoption in use cases of academic and industrial training.
AIM: Tell us about the tech stack.
Kanav Singla: Adloid is empowering enterprises to enable– the discovery of their products round the clock; an immersive experience of their offerings from the comfort and safety of home; an increased user engagement in terms of time spent; lead nurturing and qualification via intuitive UX; and conversion boost via integrated call-to-actions within the platform.
All of this is achieved via an integrated platform for enabling the transition to virtual, photo realistic rendering of 3D assets, full technology stack and tools with low-code integration or implementation, and sector-agnostic AR and 3D capabilities to solve for the variety.
AIM: How does Adloid use AI and ML?
Kanav Singla: We make use of computer vision for surface or object recognition, detection, tracking, classification, and segmentation. We also use AI and ML algorithms in analytics for predicting user traffic and lead conversion, leading to cost and platform optimisation, along with use in QC of our codes.
AIM: What tech tools do you use?
Kanav Singla: Adloid uses WebGL and AWS as external technologies. We have developed our own suite of tools and platforms for the entire workflow– starting with content creation, to deployment and maintenance.
AIM: Explain the working of the AR technology.
Kanav Singla: Our platform brings together multiple technologies we have developed over the years to solve for the complete workflow. It includes:
- 3D uploader which supports major 3D file sizes
- Editor
- Viewer, along with compression and export capabilities
- AR viewer and creator platform
- UI and analytics dashboard
- Deployment tools (website, app, Facebook, Snapchat)
- No-code integration tools
All of these come together in a single package to empower immersive AR experiences for our clients and community.
AIM: How many clients have you served so far? Name a few notable ones.
Kanav Singla: Adloid has served 10-plus large enterprises across multiple sectors and have been co-innovating to provide the best in class to our clients. Notable clients include Asian Paints, Tata Motors, Hero MotoCorp, CarDekho, Tanishq, Titan Eyeplus, HP and Orient Electric.
AIM: What are your future plans?
Kanav Singla: We are planning to geographically expand to the US market; invest more on IP and patents; and acquire 50-plus customers in the current financial year. Additionally, we have hiring plans across sales, marketing and product teams.
