Why Tech Companies Are Pumping Money Into Artificial Intelligence They are looking forward to new opportunities in AI to transform their daily operations
By Nidhi Singh
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Artificial intelligence is drawing major investments this year with many Indian start-ups and tech giants betting big on this technology to break into the market.
Tech companies are looking forward to new opportunities in AI to transform their daily operations. With the ongoing global competition in AI and companies racing for it, there's much hype around this technology. This year the tech industry has witnessed significant push for AI with investments in this technology related start-ups and companies reaching to new heights.
Let's take a look at the investment trends in this domain in 2017 and the major investments made.
Niki.ai
An Economic Times report stated that Ratan Tata-backed, AI-based conversational chatbot Niki.ai has raised funding this year from a German multinational software corporation SAP.
The Bengaluru-based start-up was founded in May 2015 by 4 IIT Kharagpur graduates — Sachin Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, Shishir Modi and Nitin Babel. The company also raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Unilazer Ventures, a Mumbai-based VC firm founded by Ronnie Screwvala, in October 2015. This was followed by another seed funding round by Ratan Tata in May 2016.
Absentia Virtual Reality Private Limited
Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence and virtual reality start-up Absentia raised $1.2 million (INR 8 crore) funding in Pre-series A Funding round this year.
The funding was raised from venture capital firm Exfinity Venture Partners, whose founding parts are T.V Mohandas Pai, Deepak Ghaisas, Girish Paranjpe and V. Balakrishnan.
The start-up is developing an AI engine — Norah AI — that allows developers to stretch the boundaries of human imagination, creativity and expression through strategic inbuilt tools on the layers of deep learning and procedural interactive content design.
QorQL
Digital Payment player Paytm has invested an undisclosed amount in Noida-based online health tech start-up QorQL, which uses artificial intelligence and big data to improve a doctor's productivity, care quality, and patient experience.
QorQL was launched in 2015 by Sanjay Singh and Dr. Shalini Singh. The start-up basically offers two solutions — Qcare and Qhealth. Qcare involves a service where doctors can access patient health data and manage clinics with the help of a few clicks of the mouse. Qhealth, on the other hand, tracks health data, vitals and schedules.
Innefu Labs
Delhi-based AI start-up Innefu Labs raised $ 2 million Series A funding from IndiaNivesh venture capital fund. Innefu, founded in 2011 by Tarun Wig and Abhishek Sharma, is a research oriented information- security consulting group that specializes in meeting the information security needs of the consumer via specialized products and services.
It serves diverse industry verticals and the prominent among them are Law Enforcement, BFSI, BPOs/KPOs, E-commerce, IT/ITES, Education, Telecom etc. The start-up will primarily use funds to enhance its AI platform for predictive intelligence and facial biometrics. The start-up will utilize funds to enhance its cyber security solutions related to predictive intelligence and biometric authentication.
