10 Deep Learning startups from Indian founders to watch out for

Imagine this, we are living in 2030 where you point the camera of your wearable device to a certain object and the wearable device feeds you with information about the object in real time. Let’s take this a level further, imagine a police officer wearing a Google Glass receiving information about any individual in real-time while just looking at them. It seems RoboCop could be a reality soon! Standing at the core of this is Deep Learning, a sub branch to Machine Learning but from a different set of mathematical algorithms. This technology tries to mimic the human brain, processing humungous visual data for scene, event, document, and face recognition.

From much extravagant imaginations to simpler uses, Deep Learning today is applied for contextual advertisements, and getting the right data to the user at the earliest.

In the US, the Internet biggies are already sprinting in this sector with Yahoo acquiring LookFlow and IQ Engines. Furthermore, with launch of Google Brain, Google has acquired five players in the last two years to increase its grip in the image recognition and the neural network space.

However, there are a couple of Indian founders carrying the baton forward in this space. Following is the list:

TargetingMantra: Founded by Saurabh Nangia and Rahul Singh, this venture analyses and learns from behaviour of the user across the web and mobile to personalise and showcase the most relevant information and products to the user. This helps e-commerce players increase conversion rate and revenues.

Hachi: Hachi helps to link the points between your social-network contacts recommending the ‘best people path’ to you. Spreading across multiple social networks, the solution claims to find the most likely-to-succeed introductions for a user. The startup was founded by Rachna Singh in 2011.

AdElement: Founded by Sachin Bhatevara, the solution helps performance marketers build personalised creatives, target audience segments and bid for optimisation. As one of the features, genetic algorithms find the elements and combinations that are performing well and suggest ad combinations.

InvenZone: The brain child of Vinay Kumar and Deekshith Marla, the venture works as the Google Scholar for researchers and scientists, providing additional insights with relevant research. Optimising on the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), InvenZone aims to find answers to researchers at the earliest, helping save time during the research.

HyperVerge: Co-founded in India in December 2013 by a five-member team of Kedar Kulkarni, Vignesh Krishnakumar, Kishore Natarajan, Saivenkatesh Ashokkumar, and Praveen Kumar, this startup today functions out of the Silicon Valley. Through their mobile application Silver, they plan to work around organising images by identification of the content (people, places, scenes, and events) in the same.

SnapShopr: MobileSparks 2015 Company, SnapShopr is an image search technology, which helps online retailers not just to push their retention and conversion numbers but also helps end users figure out their favourite item. “All it takes for an end user is to take the photo of what they like and they have it for instant purchase,” says Co-founder Naveen. Lately, biggies like Flipkart and Snapdeal are also trying to enter the space. The startup was founded by Navneet Sharma and Debashish Pattnaik in September 2014.

Media.net: Media.net powers the Yahoo! Bing Network Contextual Ads program helping the platform with contextual advertisements, thus requiring Deep Learning. The firm is founded by Divank Turakhia.

Veooz: Founded by Srini Koppolu, Prasad Pingali and Vasudeva Varma this platform’s algorithm engine continuously discovers and analyses more than 100,000 news magazine and blog sources to present the right mix of stories and feeds to the user.

Ayasdi: Using the power of Machine Intelligence, the startup aims to provide insight through uncovering deep intelligence of the data. The core of the platform uses Topological Data Analysis (TDA) which when powered with Machine Learning derives insights from complex matters of data.

Reifier. : Founded by Sonal Goyal, the startup helps discover, enhance and consolidate business data by combining big data technologies with Machine Learning.

Most of the above companies were founded or incubated in India but shifted to the Silicon Valley which is brimming with opportunities for these players. However, with Indian markets just warming up to the concept, bigger players like InMobi are entering this space, utilising this technology for their digital advertisement platform Miip in India.

It is only with time that we will know how this technology will shape the market in India serving a different category of audience.

This list has 10 initiatives but we’re sure there are many more entrepreneurs operating in the Deep Learning space. Do drop in a comment and we’ll make regular additions to this list and keep it updated.