Entrepreneur Prasad Pingali, CEO of Setu Software, on building state of the art product technologies

Tell us about SETU.

SETU is a research based niche technology company. SETU’s vision is to bridge information access barriers. SETU is coined as an acronym for 'Search and Extraction Technologies Unlimited’.

How are you different from similar players in the market?

SETU’s technologies in most of the cases are on par with the state of the art and in many cases extend far beyond the state of the art. Being out of a research university, SETU enjoys access to some of the great researchers in the world. Not many companies in India are focusing on plying technologies related to Indian languages, search, semantic web, summarization and sentiment analysis. SETU’s leading edge products address enterprise customers’ needs to search, extract, and summarize large volumes of human language content.

SETOOZ, a plural form of SETU, a multi-lingual search engine, is the second most sought after search engine for many of the European languages. The engine is currently deployable in 70 languages from around the world. SETOOZ currently provides search capability for 23 European languages. The Indian Language search of Rediff is powered by SETOOZ.

Semantifire, SETU’s another cutting edge semantic technology, uses the emerging Web 3.0 to serve enterprise customers’ needs. With its rich ontological structure, Semantifire helps the users to fire complex, inferential queries which are otherwise not supported by the keyword based search engines. The technology also serves as a platform to enrich a document or a website with rich semantics gathered from the web. Semantifire supports all W3C compliant file formats and is capable of processing huge amounts of information. Semantifire comes with a smart, easy-to-use SPARQL endpoint to mention the user need.

How did the idea for your startup come about? The idea came about when we thought of taking our technology to the society. The technology area we work in is very critical to businesses. So fortunately we didn’t find it very difficult to get the right customers. Since SETU started as an incubated company at IIIT-H’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, all the required support to set up the company was provided.

Tell us about your background.

I have 12+ years of experience in IT industry and hold a doctoral degree in Indian Language Information Access from IIIT-H. I was a doctoral student of Prof. Vasudeva Varma, who heads IIIT-H's Search & Information Extraction Lab (SIEL). Our research for the last decade related to Indian Language web search resulted in the outcome of SETU Software Systems Pvt. Ltd. I have been working as adjunct faculty at IIIT-H for the past 4 years. Before my arrival to India, I have worked with two startups in the Silicon Valley.

Let us know about the tie-ups that you have (if any). Is there acceptance for your concept? Can you give us some incidents to illustrate the same?

In our three years of journey, we already have a list of reputed clients under our belt like Samsung, Rediff, Eterno – Newshunt, HMRI and few others. More than our business market, we draw great pleasure from the way our educational product myDrona(a portable and personalized learning platform) is helping the younger generation of India both from cities and villages alike. We see such a product to be highly impactful in shaping the future of the country.

Where do you see your start up five years from now?We see SETU playing a leadership role in helping even the most under privileged users in India to reap the benefits of cutting edge technologies by using them in their day-to-day life.

What is your revenue model? Have you been funded?

SETU didn’t raise any funds till date. Currently we are exploring strategic partnerships with people who can bring finances and marketing experience.

As an entrepreneur, what are your joys?

Happy customers who use our technologies gives me lot of joy and satisfaction.

How big is your team? Give us some info on team composition. Are you looking at hiring?

We are a strong team of 20, most of them having Masters by Research degrees from IIIT, Hyderabad. We are currently looking to expand our design and business development teams.

Let us know about your expansion plans.

We currently intend to grow our market reach through suitable partnerships.

Anything else that you want to tell us.

One of the most interesting and first consumer products of SETU is myDrona. myDrona is a portable and personalized education platform which is a combination of powerful servers and a low cost pocket gadget. myDrona’s vision is to give a wider reach to the learning material available in the internet which is going unused due to lack of knowledge, time, resources and awareness.

SETU’s powerful servers semantically search the web and locate the relevant, best quality content from the huge amount of learning material available. We are now able to offer equal access to such material available on the web to the underprivileged backgrounds at unbelievably low costs through myDrona. myDrona has completed its initial phase of pilot marketing and is all set for being launched into the market.

YourStory wishes SETU Software good luck as they roll out new products into the market. We are really excited about myDrona and will keep a track of how the product is received in the market! What do you think about this story? Please write to us at feedback@yourstory.in