How Pensieve is democratising the Indian judicial system with its AI-powered solutions

Artificial intelligence (AI) could be the most transformative technology in the history of mankind. While consumer-facing AI is rapidly evolving, AI in legal terms is still in its early days. As the time-consuming process of legal research and manual document review affects productivity, Hyderabad-based Pensieve offers solutions aimed to address this gap and allow legal professionals to handle important tasks efficiently.

Co-founded in 2016 by Gaurav Shrivastava, Navaneeth Reddy, and Dr. Prahlad Routh, Pensieve is a text-analytics and linguistics company that offers document intelligence for unstructured data in legal regulatory compliance and financial domain.

Innovating solutions for unstructured data

Pensieve is a product of creative dreams and innovation. “Every day there are more algorithms developed in the ecosystem, and using them in a business enterprise for the legal regulatory compliance and to protect the unstructured data, along with human intervention leads to creating innovative products in the way people interact with these data,” Gaurav says.

So, Pensieve tried to solve the problem of managing ‘massive unstructured enterprise data’ that was blended with the ecosystem of AI growth occurring at that time. While Gaurav is the Founder and CEO of Pensieve, Navaneeth works on business strategy and fundraising activities and Dr Prahlad guides the data science team in developing cutting-edge algorithms.

The services offered are based on the capabilities of text analytics coupled with their rigorously trained engines which are fast and scalable. They come with an API to integrate with the user’s applications and workflows, both for cloud and on-premise, thereby ensuring solutions that have the potential to become a perfect framework. Here, Navaneeth shares about one of their premium services done for the Indian Defence Forces, — a system that’s similar to Alexa — based on their legal literature.

“The idea was to democratise the Indian judicial system where a common man is unaware of his situation when he commits a fault. The procedure of reaching out to the lawyer without any know-how was the problem we wanted to address at the beginning,” Navaneeth says.

Currently, Pensieve has two products - Mitra and Smriti.

Mitra was the search engine initially meant for the lawyers in aiding their legal research, but eventually, it reached out to help the common man in getting a better understanding of the legal reforms, and make them well informed while they reach out to any lawyer and comprehend the situation better. For instance, a common man just needs to type his problem like, “I am facing a credit card default, and the bank is suing me. What should I do?”, and he gets instant advice.

Smriti was the engine meant to ensure contract management solutions. It had algorithms that created a quick contract out of the template placed, thereby helping its users to draft complex contracts from scratch, and analyse the contract risks through intuitive dashboards and alerts to help users contemplate the future contract risks.

Delving deeper into the services, Navaneeth realised there is a need for the engines run by deep learning models that would crunch data in a matter of seconds.“We will sit on your data for two days, and streamline it, searching and extracting entities out of the document, making the productivity rate faster, with a qualitative impact, and a cut down in the delays that used to occur in the process,” he adds.

Getting a step closer

Mitra is an Indian term that means friend, and Gaurav and Navaneeth wanted to reach out to the Indian audience at large. Thus, the need was felt to get the business registered with a .in domain. It was mainly the factor of exploring the Indian ecosystem that worked as a marketing pitch, leading to opt for the .in domain thereby creating an impact.

“There is no denial of the fact that investing in a .in domain name extension works great for creating the brand name. There was a huge interest for the .in domain because it helps in the long run across the Indian ecosystem,” Gaurav says.

The National Internet Exchange for India (NIXI) is helping many businesses across the country to get a .in or .Bharat domain. Enterprises irrespective of their scale and size can avail a .in domain with the help of NIXI. It is affordable and can be availed in more than 22 languages for businesses coming from all regions of the country.

Growth and revenue

Gaurav feels that Pensieve’s biggest success was creating a platform making the most of algorithmic work, and getting the AI system ready for an end-user within a shorter span.

Talking of growth, Navaneeth feels that they have shifted from a product kind of approach to a modular approach of the text-analytics capabilities. The initial days were tough when they were mostly asking for interactions instead of thinking about the revenue. While the beginning of 2019 saw Pensieve hitting good revenue numbers with 100,000., 2020 was slightly turbulent as it couldn’t create much of an impact due to the work-from-home culture.

2021 saw a sharp rise in revenue growth reaching almost 250,000-300,000, and Pensieve is anticipating almost 10 times the growth of this number due to larger projects in the pipeline.

He feels they have been luckily put at the ‘right place at the right time’. “The growth of AI and machine learning, coupled with the prevalence of online work brought about by the pandemic has led to the process of digitisation across domains. Thus, we have integrated the process of digitising documents with AI technology, thereby leading to a host of opportunities for us,” adds Gaurav.

The ‘Shaping India Inc's Online Growth’ series chronicles the journeys of startups and SMEs in India and how creating an online presence on the .in or .Bharat domain powered their success stories.