How these startups in NetApp Excellerator’s 2nd cohort are using bots, AI and ML to help their customers stay focused and relevant

For organisations today, dealing with threats has become more complex -- cyber-threats, threats posed by wrong diagnoses, the threat of competitors charging ahead, and threat of losing business due to network or service outages. In a manner of speaking, the six startups that are part of the NetApp Excellerator’s second cohort are all helping their clients stay safe from all such threats, among other things.

Launched in June 2017, the NetApp Excellerator programme aims to help B2B startups realise the full potential of their ideas, fine-tune them and make them ready for a global market. Following the success of its first cohort which graduated in December 2017, now the six startups in the second cohort are poised to make a significant impact across sectors with their exciting data-driven solutions. Here are the six startups:

Also read: ‘B2B startups in India are making inroads in enterprise space’

NANOBI

Doing business is challenging, no matter the size or sector. What is universal across all industry verticals is the intense competition, a need for companies to keep pace with changing technological trends and to take strategic decisions in real time.

Bangalore-based analytics solutions company Nanobi helps its clients do exactly that. It was founded in 2012 by Mahesh Ramakrishnan, Vinod CV, Abhishek Purohit and Dr S Jayaprakash, all with deep domain expertise in Banking and Technology. Gayatri Balaji came on board as CEO in December 2017.

The Team

Mahesh, who is also the company’s MD has over 25 years of experience in Product & Process Innovation and New Product development. Vinod, VP Solutions, comes with over 18 years of domain knowledge in Risk Management, Credit Cards and CRM Analytics for the BFSI segment. Abhishek , VP – Product Development has over 18 years of experience in Sales, Product & Solution development in Analytics, DW, BI Solutions. Dr. S. Jayaprakash – Co-Founder and VP has over 25 years of experience in Insurance and IT Industry. Gayatri has over 25 years of experience in leadership positions across global companies and specializes in building and scaling businesses rapidly.

What they do

Nanobi delivers analytical insights to clients that help them stay on top of their game with better understanding of their customers. Their analytical solutions deliver measurable business impact across revenue upside, cost optimization and end-consumer delight to clients in the Healthcare, BFSI and Retail verticals.

How they help clients

Nanobi solves business problems (e.g. can a CFO at a US hospital predict which of his claims will get approved or CRO at a global bank predict which part of his portfolio will go delinquent?) for their clients across their customer lifecycles. Their powerful LiquiData Platform integrates data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive and prescriptive analytics into a single visual stack thereby allowing their clients the ease, efficiency and flexibility of using a one-stop platform to serve their analytical requirements. With a “nanomart” based data architecture and a rich API framework, solutions are built speedily and in easy to consume modules. Nanobi’s platform has built-in conversational bots, which makes it easy for anyone across the enterprise to use analytics to drive decision-making.

The future for their technology

According to Gayatri, “We see four things happening when our technology and solutions mature in 12-18 months from now:

• The number of our users who will extensively use the bot feature already available on our platform to communicate in a normal conversational mode and configure analytics or reports will exponentially outnumber the number of users who will interact with the platform through report designers
• Learning algorithms (available in a limited way) will take over and guide the user thereby sharpening insights and rendering greater and greater measurable
• More of our users will get comfortable with the data curation features available on our platform and start to bring external data into the analytics to understand better what is happening and why it is happening
• Plug and Play analytics using mobile based analytical apps will become more pervasive.

ANLYZ

In this fast-paced age of constantly-evolving information, the threats and security risks to this information are also changing faster than we can keep pace with them. So enterprises need data security solutions that are not only responsive but also futuristic, in a manner of speaking.

Anlyz is a cyber security firm that creates smart solutions to obliterate tomorrow’s threats in the present.

What they do

ANLYZ LLC was started in May 2017 out of Delaware, US & Bahrain. They leverage new-wave technologies and standards to provide continuous real-time visibility enabling prediction, detection and prevention of incidents leading to a shortened response lifecycle. Their products can be adapted and scaled to suit the needs of small, medium and large enterprises.

The Team

The company was founded by Sriram Govindan, a cyber security consultant who has worked with Fortune 500 companies for the past 20 years, and Parkavi Ramasamy both serial entrepreneurs who’ve founded numerous startups across business verticals.

How they help clients

In the current ecosystem, information is the most valuable currency. Anlyz’s wheels are constantly in motion, scanning the slightest digital cues to keep information safe for their clients. Equipped with advanced cyber capabilities like machine learning, AI & sophisticated hunting, Anlyz is geared to take on threats to predict and prevent attacks even much before they happen.

“As cyber-attacks evolve over time, dynamic solutions are the need of the hour. Luckily, with technology changing at even faster speeds, we foresee achieving actionable results in a vastly different way than traditional legacy security products in the market today,” say the founders.

SIGTUPLE

With a growing population, the need for effective healthcare solutions that can reach more people becomes even more imperative. But the story is playing out differently.

There is an acute shortage of qualified medical practitioners – in fact, some studies have shown that more than half of the world has access to less than 1 doctor per 1,000 population. With such abysmal doctor to patient ratio, the doctors are overburdened, thus, increasing the chances of inaccuracies and inefficiencies in diagnosis to creep in.

SigTuple is helping the medical community by creating smart data-driven healthcare solutions and services using Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

What they do

Their solutions can instantly crunch millions of data points, analyse complex patterns in visual medical data and intelligently summarise the analysis for a doctor to review the results with all visual evidences intact. Normally, this would take hours of dedicated analysis, but with their solution a doctor can make complex diagnosis more accurately, in just a matter of minutes.

The Team

SigTuple was set up in 2015 at Bangalore by Rohit Kumar Pandey (CEO), Apurv Anand (CTO) and Tathagato Rai Dastidar (Chief Scientific Officer). All three are veterans in the areas of Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics with over four and a half decades of industry experience between them.

How they help clients

The SigTuple team says it is aware of the fact that it is impossible to create new doctors overnight, especially in remote areas where access to quality healthcare still remains limited. So they want their technology to blur the difference between urban and rural healthcare by making healthcare more accessible, affordable and accurate.

They hope to drive this ‘next-gen decision-making’ with AI-enabled assistance for doctors at every critical step of diagnoses by analysing huge amounts of data.

The future for their technology

“We want to pioneer and redefine the healthcare ecosystem for a better today and an even better tomorrow. The cascading effects of our innovation would result in massive reduction in the cost of healthcare services, making healthcare not just accessible and accurate but also affordable,” says the SigTuple team.

ARCHSABER

Enterprises use a range of monitoring and analytics solutions to ensure smooth and optimal running of their IT infrastructure. These monitoring tools give comprehensive coverage of IT infrastructure over thousands of metrics. But due to human limitations, it is almost impossible to go through the huge amounts of such data in a short duration, in case of an incident. This leads to a delay in resolution of the problem, causing hours of outage in data services. In a highly competitive space, these sort of disruptions can make or break market leadership

ArchSaber helps such enterprises by giving real-time diagnosis of an incident including comprehensive details, from root cause(s) to the critical services, so the resolution can be handled immediately before it becomes an outage.

What they do

ArchSaber does deep analytics over finely grained data and ensures that clients get clear causalities amongst events, depicting the domino effect in form of a cause & impact graph.

The team

Gurugram-based ArchSaber was founded in 2016 by IIT-Delhi alumni Apoorv Garg, Arpit Jain and Ashish Gaurav. At the time when the idea was seeded, Apoorv was working in Google, Arpit in AlphaGrep and Ashish in Zomato.

How they help clients

They are currently running pilots with Zomato, LensKart, HyperTrack, and InShorts. “Although we are far from perfect, we are getting more encouraging outcomes every week. In several cases we have been able to identify issues which would get skipped on manual diagnosis. Once the learning and diagnostic model gets matured and is able to achieve high accuracy, then it will be able to not only give instant discovery of root cause and the nature of impact of even complex cluster wide incidents but also be able to suggest resolutions for them. Other benefits would include predictive alerts by recognising early stage symptoms of an outage, thus prevent recurrence of past outages altogether,” say the founders.

The future for their technology

They hope their solution will allow continuous and quality data services at any scale and complexity for enterprises, especially in vital sectors like healthcare, finance and communications.

According to them, the same model can be applied to any sector relying on infrastructure with numerous interdependent and tightly coupled components, for example highly automated manufacturing pipelines in automobile and electronics industry.

DATAKEN

When it comes to dealing with outages, a majority of enterprises deal with their network and infrastructure operations in a reactive mode, where actions are taken based on failures and then attempts are made to find the root cause.

What they do

Dataken augments AI & ML capabilities for enterprises, especially service providers and companies where network & infrastructure is crucial for their operations.

The Team

Dataken was set up in Bengaluru in 2014 by Suresh Gokarakonda, Raju Mentana, Pradeep Samudrala and Vivek Chekuri who have, between them, 50 years of experience of working in the telecom domain.

How their solution helps clients

“Our solution gives a consolidated view of the network, predicting the service outages and who the impacted users/customers are in near real time,” says Suresh.

Each downtime results in a loss directly impacting the productivity of the business operations. Dataken’s solution preempts the situation using Artificial Intelligence and offers root cause analysis backed by its learnings from the network.

The future for their technology

“We are seeing a trend where several other sectors are rapidly trying to adopt AI and ML techniques into their operations. We already working in the life sciences space to make a difference, and we see there are innumerable possibilities in every sector,” says Suresh.

BLOBCITY INC

Businesses today struggle with data split across silos. They spend several hours and resources in preparing data for analytics, yet the business heads get to look at only limited data which is delayed and offers almost no interactivity.

What they do

BlobCity allows companies to readily analyse data from over 750 hosted apps that can be easily integrated with existing on-premise data systems across a wide variety of data formats. This enables business heads to create their own personal dashboards, watch pre-configured dashboards, slice and dice data and perform advanced AI and ML, thereby facilitating better decision-making and enabling strategic decisions. The BlobCity team says their solution improves the overall decision-making process, with little or no formal data science training required for the decision-makers to analyse their data.

The team

BlobCity, Inc was founded in 2017 by Sanket Sarang (Co-Founder & CTO) and Karishma Kunder (Co-Founder & CEO). The company is incorporated in Delaware, US

How they help clients

BlobCity’s solutions are easy to install. Clients can onboard themselves on BlobCity on the Cloud or simplly download and install it on their hardware as a on-premise installation. According to Karishma, “Across companies that use our products, we have observed a significant improvement in the business processes and data-driven decisions being taken at the management level. They no longer use static charts and email based reports. Our real-time dashboards allow customers to get insights when they want it.”

Future for their technology

Currently, their solution is used in sectors like automobile, safety science, sustainable energy, retail etc. Going forward, Karishma believes would prove very useful in areas such as automobile simulations, healthcare, manufacturing, IoT etc.

The BlobCity team says their solution can encourage and foster citizen data science, allow business users to make their own analysis than relying on their tech teams to do it, allow companies to focus on actionable insights over data than figure out how to do data science.