Building a product company from Tamil Nadu; LiteFold is accelerating drug discovery
Responsive has been profitable since 2018 and has never grown slower than 25% a year, including through the pandemic.
Hello,
A new buzzword in AI circles is ‘distillation’.
The word refers to the concept of training a smaller or cheaper “student” model with outputs from a stronger “teacher” model.
Distillation became a hot topic last week. US lawmakers and tech companies raised concerns after Chinese lab Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, and users quickly found it to be competitive with the best commercially available AI from Anthropic and OpenAI, according to CNBC.
The development has opened a debate over ethical use of data and AI models since tech companies use publicly available data to train their models.
Meanwhile, a pilot programme to introduce a humanoid robot in a school in the US has hit a roadblock after teachers said it dehumanises the teaching profession.
Speaking of robots, some people are apparently so frustrated with AI creeping in day-to-day life that they are joining a workshop to avoid AI.
During the workshop Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia, starts with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, explaining why people might want to use these products, and why they might opt to abstain. He even guides people on how to turn off specific features on these apps, according to TechCrunch.
In today’s newsletter, we will talk about
- Building a product company from Tamil Nadu
- LiteFold is accelerating drug discovery
Here’s your trivia for today: The Plato Scale is used specifically in the making of what beverage?
In-depth
Building a product company from Tamil Nadu
Few people have heard about the company, Responsive, the firm that counts companies such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Google, AWS, Walmart, UnitedHealth, Roche and BBVA among its clients
Formerly called RFPIO, Responsive provides solutions that help companies better manage their workflows, especially paperwork related to tenders.
Key takeaways:
- Microsoft has been Responsive’s customer since 2019. According to Ganesh Shankar, 25,000 of its employees use the platform. The proposal team there, by Microsoft's own account, has helped bring in over $10 billion of revenue.
- Responsive has been profitable since 2018 and has never grown slower than 25% a year, including through the pandemic.
- The company earlier raised angel money from friends and family, and then a $25 million cheque from K1 Investment Management in July 2018. That is the last round it raised, and the money mostly went to buying out the early backers.
In-focus
LiteFold is accelerating drug discovery
Bengaluru and Delaware-based LiteFold is a biotech AI-native platform that accelerates computational biology workflows.
According to co-founder Anindyadeep Sannigrahi, biological research work, especially in therapeutics and drug development, usually requires large multidisciplinary teams: AI specialists, infrastructure experts, software engineers, legal professionals, and more. LiteFold helps streamline the process.
Key takeaways:
- LiteFold’s AI began as an open-source project. Sannigrahi later shifted it into a proprietary platform after recognising the commercial potential of the technology.
- Sannigrahi says LiteFold has been drawing interest from several parts of the biotech ecosystem. Startups, in particular, are looking for ways to reduce timelines and costs.
- LiteFold is currently not charging B2C customers using the platform for academic research as Sannigrahi believes computational protein design is still a nascent field.
News & updates
- Climate crisis: The so-called super El Niño is likely to inflict a combined $10 billion to $20 billion hit on affected African countries and trigger mass migration from hard-hit areas, Reuters reported, citing a climate expert from the African Development Bank.
- Weather: China saw Typhoon Noul make landfall early Sunday. Hundreds of flights have been cancelled in southern China and Hong Kong as the typhoon hit the region. It prompted the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people in Guangdong province.
- A hero: Hollywood actor Ryan Gosling will join the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the titular character in a new Ghost Rider film, the company has announced. Gosling said it is a character he has "wanted to play for a very long time".
What you should watch out for
- Major tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are likely to release earnings for the second quarter of 2026.
- Indian markets will keep a close eye on earnings of mid-cap engineering firms, such as Larsen & Toubro and Coforge, which are expected to release their reports on Monday.
The Plato Scale is used specifically in the making of what beverage?
Answer: Beer
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