MeshLabs; Helps Extract Business Insight From Text

MeshLabs is a pure-play developer of text analytics software. Their mission is to develop new and easy-to-use text analytics tools that help businesses discover insights from text at fractional time and cost. Their core product is a hybrid text analytics engine that combines linguistic (NLP), statistic, and semantic approaches. They typically solve problems in the customer experience management, business intelligence, information management, and compliance areas of all major industries. The engine is built to enterprise performance standards, and offers flexible integration capabilities including content connectors and APIs.Incubated in 2009 at NSRCEL, IIM-Bengaluru, they are a team of information retrieval professionals who are passionate about building easy to use data mining solutions.

“We are in the Business Analytics space and Traditional business analytics software is focused more on structured data stored in relational databases. We all are now witnessing an explosion of unstructured content. Whereas, the structured data growth has been slow and steady. Given this scenario, a lot of business insight is in the text." says Shantanu Gudihal, founder at Meshlabs.

Processing text in various natural languages requires sophisticated linguistic, statistic, and semantic computational approaches that are not available in standard business intelligence or analytical tools. That is why business analysts need text mining and analytics software to help them discover these insights. So far, processing and understanding text written in natural language has been left only to humans. That means manual effort and scale limitations. "Through text analytics, you now have tools that can augment human intelligence. Voice of Customer application is the best known use case for using text analytics to discover customer opinion on products and services. We believe any business that is content rich should investigate using text analytics." says Umesh, the director of sales at Meshlabs.

For example, publishers can bring new content derived products to the market, insurance companies can mine their adjuster notes and customer statements to detect fraud and mitigate risks, contact centers can integrate intelligent agents such as question and answer systems into their service platforms, knowledge-centric professional services firms can transform productivity of their employees by giving them better information discovery tools.

Target Markets:

"The Indian market size in this space is approximately INR 46 Crores in the year 2011-12." says Umesh. Their target industries include Travel, Hospitality and Entertainment, Media and Publishing, Professional Services, Financial Services and Life Sciences.

The company claims to have seen steady increase in interest among companies to use text analytics technology to process vast amounts of textual data present in their support center notes, e-mails, surveys, financial reports, business documents in enterprise content management systems (ECM) among many other content sources and types.

Expansion Plans:

MeshLabs was founded by Venkatesh Rao (CEO), Sampath Herga, Arijit Mitra and Shantanu Gudihal. All four have technology and management backgrounds that are complementary to each others and were drawn to the field of information extraction from their past experiences in dealing with information management challenges in various capacities.

They now intend to continue to build on their text analytics focus. They are enabling What-if and dependence tree modules into their platform. Machine learning systems with a strong focus on unsupervised learning is something they are building capabilities. Multiple language capability with transliteration enablement. “We will very soon come up with a capability for the developers to access our platform with the API support. With this developers will have the power of text analytics delivered to their applications over cloud.” informs Umesh.

More about MeshLabs here. They can be reached at [email protected]

- Abhilasha Dafria and Jubin Mehta