Google betting on AI from India
Firms that help medicos, travellers, cooks with insights are high on the agenda
It’s no coincidence that at about the time that Google CEO Sundar Pichai has professed the company was moving into an ‘articial intelligence rst’ world, the Internet giant is backing AI startups in India to help it achieve that goal. Young ventures that analyse medical data to reduce human error, gather insights to help travellers and provide cooking apps for dierent culinary needs, are some of the AI companies that Google is nurturing at its ‘Launchpad Accelerator.’ “The pace at which youcan solve problems is so much faster when you apply (AI),” said Paul Ravindranath G, programmanager, Google India. “We have begun including companies that are meaningfully solving problems... using AI and machine learning.” The rm’s sixmonth accelerator programme matches young companies from emerging ecosystems with the best of its people, network and advanced technologies to help scale their products. It also connects them with mentors from top tech rms and venture capitalists in the Silicon Valley, U.S. In return, Google, whose
parent company Alphabet Inc. reported a revenue of $90.27 billion in 2016, is hoping that its technology and cloud computing platform gets consumed by these startups and they build their innovation on top of them. One such rm is SigTuple
which is building intelligent screening solutions to aid
system used by these people are constrained by supplydemand mismatch and operational ineciencies. Manish Rathi, cofounder of RailYatri said its platform eciently uses crowdsourcing, data analytics and intelligence to help travellers make smarter decisions.
diagnosis through AIpowered analysis of visual medical data. The rm aims to improve speed, accuracy and consistency ofa number of screening processes. Also, medical institutions can serve more patients, with a signicant reduction in human errors. When the Bengalurubased rm wanted to expand in the U.S., Google mentored the company on fullling regulatory requirements such as getting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval.Google also helped the rm identify manufacturing companies in the U.S. when it found the process challenging in India. “They try to identify areas where you need help,” said Rohit Kumar Pandey, 34, cofounder of SigTuple.
AI chef Through its accelerator programme, Google is also rigorously fostering TensorFlow, asoftware that makes it easier to build AI systems. This is being used by Kochibased startup Agrima Infotech. It had built a deeplearning computer vision technology which could be used for advanced image recognition techniques. Agrima has implemented this in ‘Recipe Book’ a popular cooking app on Android Play store. The app solves the recipe discovery problem. For example, a user needs to just click an image of an ingredient. It then quickly recognises and suggests the best recipes which could be made out of that ingredient. Anoop Balakrishnan, 28,
CEO of Agrima, said the ‘good thing’ about Google’s acceleration programme is that “it doesn’t take any stake” in the companies. ‘Recipe Book’ saw more than 2.5 million downloads in its rst year and has spread across 104 countries, according to the rm. Google’s accelerator programme is also backing Noidabased RailYatri, whose app helps longdistance travellers at every stage of the journey. This includes enquiry about seats, the best route to take, information about train delays as well ordering the food and booking the hotel. The rm said close to 40 million people in India take longdistance journeys daily. However, the transportation
New tools, old problems Google was among the earliest to start buying private rms to advance its own AI research and is now the most active acquirer in the space, according to CB Insights, a data intelligence platform. This July, Google acquired Bengalurubased Halli Labs that applies modern AI and machinelearning techniques to solve old problems. This month, dunzo, a taskfullment startup that leverages AI and human operators also raised a $12.3million Series B round led by Google, according to Aspada, an investor in the Bengalurubased rm. Dunzo provides
a conversational
mobile commerce platform. It manages the discovery and fullment of local tasks across categories such as food and grocery delivery, and offline retail purchases. In 2013, Google also
picked up deep learning and neural network startup DNNresearch from the computer science department at the University of Toronto, said CB Insights. It said this acquisition
reportedly
helped Google make major upgrades to its image search feature. In 2014 Google acquired British company DeepMind Technologies for some $600 million.
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