On this year’s International Women’s Day, Analytics Drift takes a deep dive into highlighting how the mentioned women entrepreneurs are contributing their part into building better AI-powered today and tomorrow.
Geetha Manjunath, Niramai
AI has been a blessing to the field of medical imaging due to its ability to detect difficult-to-trace anomalies. After a personal tragedy, committed to offering early-stage breast cancer diagnosis in a non-contact, non-invasive, and privacy-conscious manner, Geetha Manjunath founded Niramai health-tech firm. Niramai is an artificial intelligence-driven diagnostic platform that uses patented thermal image processing and machine learning algorithms for reliable and accurate breast cancer screening. Women of all ages can benefit from this low-cost, easy-to-use product, making cancer screening possible in all clinics.
Thermalytix, a cloud-hosted analytics tool built by the health tech firm, employs big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning algorithms for early breast cancer detection. Thermalytix’s solution primarily consists of a high-resolution thermal sensor device that captures thermal pictures and a cloud-hosted analytics system that analyses and screens for breast cancer.
Niramai provided Home Breast Health Screening for high-risk women and cancer survivors who needed monitoring during the Covid-19 outbreak. Earlier, it had also received money from the CDC UK to create a FeverTest screening for recognizing Covid-19 symptoms. NIRAMAI FeverTest has capabilities that recognize and identify non-compliance with mask-wearing standards, which can help restrict the spread of COVID-19. Morgan Stanley, Kotak Bank, and various RMZ business parks across India were among the popular adopters of this solution.
Geetha has been listed among India’s top women achievers by Forbes in 2020.
Meghna Saraogi, StyleDotMe
Starting her career as a graphic designer, Meghna Saraogi founded StyleDotMe, which was seed-funded by the Indian Angel Network in 2016. StyleDotMe is an augmented reality (AR) platform; its flagship product, mirrAR, allows customers to try on jewelry digitally. The software was first introduced in 2017 as an in-store inventory management solution, with a web version following in January 2020. The technology enables jewelry makers to expand their reach by giving customers additional product selections, the chance to examine numerous jewelry items on themselves in rapid succession, and instant fashion guidance from experts. MirrAR can also be integrated into any platform, whether on a device like an iPad or on the web, allowing for offline and online use.
With instant polls and voting options, users can access instant fashion advice from not only friends and followers, but from professionals all across the world. StyleDotMe had teamed with jewelry company Tanishq for a virtual jewelry try-on experience zone at Delhi and Bangalore airports after launching mirrAR at Bridal Asia in August 2018. Today, its clientele includes several international and domestic brands like PC Jewellers, Farah Khan Jewellery, Amrapali, and several small retail jewelers.
Barkha Sharma, Bash.ai
While the rest of the world was gradually embracing automated solutions, Barkha Sharma saw that HR functions were becoming obsolete. Therefore, Barkha created Bash.ai in her living room in 2017 in an effort to automate HR operations and thereby aid in providing better and consistent employee experiences. Bash’s user-friendly front-end interface allows businesses to automate discussions with employees in real-time with great accuracy. It includes modules such as post-hire orientation, ticketing, HR helpdesk, employee engagement, organizing HR operations, and answering inquiries about payslips and business regulations. This allows the HR team to be more efficient, motivate employees to be more productive, and save the company money by retaining personnel.
Bash’s chatbot is available on a variety of platforms, including Facebook, Messenger, and Slack.
Pooja Rao, Qure.ai
While India has hundreds of radiologists, most of them are centered in metro or Tier I cities. As a result, residents from the suburbs are left with the option to either drive considerable distances to a healthcare center or rely on third-party radiologists at hospitals. Both of these options are unpleasant as well as ineffective.
Qure.ai, situated in Mumbai and co-founded by Pooja Rao in 2016, employs artificial intelligence to make healthcare solutions more inexpensive and accessible. It employs deep learning algorithms to analyze medical pictures and scans in seconds, such as chest X-rays, head CT scans, POQUS, chest CT scans, and so on. The startup has already worked with AstraZeneca to employ AI for lung cancer screening in 2020.
Qure.ai is also a part of NVIDIA’s Inception startup accelerator program. The AI technology qXR from Qure.ai aids triage decisions in COVID patients by monitoring illness development and providing a risk score. Last year, Qure.ai obtained its first FDA approval in the United States. Its technology has also been recognized by the World Health Organization, which has recognized AI as an effective method for diagnosing TB, particularly in places where healthcare professionals are scarce. The firm has partnered with the NITI Aayog, the Piramal Foundation’s Piramal Swasthya program, and the PATH NGO in India.
Read More: Amazon India launches #SheIsAmazon campaign to Honor Women who Lead by Example
Gazal S. Kalra, Rivigo
Gazal S. Kalra, an alumnus of IIT Delhi, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and Harvard Kennedy School of Government, is a co-founder of Rivigo, a trucking AI-based logistics platform financed by Elevation Capital and Warburg Pincus, among others. During a coffee meetup with co-founder Deepak Garg, Gazal noticed that transportation is a major aspect of India’s operations for businesses as broad as manufacturing, FMCG, and eCommerce. Trucks are often outdated, exposed to harsh weather conditions where tarpaulin serves as cover, and poorly maintained, with no insight into when a truck would arrive at its destination after leaving the origination point.
Rivigo uses a relay trucking model, in which truck drivers do not run their cars for more than five hours at a time and return home the same day, owing to AI taking care of routing and pilot assignment. Rivigo’s trucks are IoT-enabled, allowing for real-time monitoring of the vehicle’s status. This helps to ensure reliability by reducing breakdowns. The IoT-based monitoring proved even more useful when Rivigo launched refrigerated vehicles for the fresh produce market. Clients of Rivigo can check the temperature in real-time and even modify it remotely using the mobile app which is available in more than ten languages.
Further, despite the high unemployment rate, people were unwilling to take up the occupation of the truck driver as they had to travel large distances to deliver the shipments and goods single-handedly, often resulting in delays and staying away from their families for a long time.
Megha Gambhir, Stupa Sports Analytics
Table tennis is a fast-paced game with a lot of spin and quick ball exchanges, which makes it difficult to analyze. Megha Gambhir had spent a significant amount of time seeing that her husband, an ardent Table Tennis fan and player, was having difficulty finding a tool to help him with his task of and tracking players’ performance. This prompted her and her husband to co-found Stupa Sports Analytics.
While there are other sport analytics companies, Stupa Sports is the world’s first AI-backed sports analytics firm for table tennis. Unlike other sports analytics systems, it also does not require high-speed cameras to gather and review player performance. Stupa uses low-cost technologies like a smartphone camera to provide AI-enabled ball tracking and video analytics. The solution offers advanced video analytics that can monitor a very tiny ball moving at over 100 kilometers per hour.
The central idea is extracting data from matches or training to the smallest detail, then processing and mining it with appropriate statistical and analytical data to produce interactive AI-enabled analysis backed up by sliced video snippets. Coaches and players can access all of this input and analysis using a mobile application. Stupa offers real-time match and training analysis, as well as ball trajectory detection, speed tracking, and heat map derivations.
In addition, Stupa has collaborated with the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) and has expanded into 226 nations. The USATT, Hungary, Sweden, and Portugal federations have joined forces as their exclusive analytics partner for their national teams and athletes.
Ashwini Asokan, Mad Street Den
Ashwini Asokan is the co-founder of Mad Street Den, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup, with a professional degree in Visual Communications from India and a Master’s in Interaction Design from the United States. Mad Street Den was co-founded by her husband, Anand Chandrasekaran and she, in 2013 with the goal of bringing a human element to AI and creating meaningful AI applications that may positively impact both the business and consumer lives. Vue.ai, the company’s first product, was created in 2016 to enable intelligent retail automation. Vue.ai includes seven different products, viz., VueTag, VueModel, VueStyle, VueCommerce, VueMail, VueFind and VueStudio, to offer retailers a unified system.
Users can utilize this AI-based system to identify face emotions or expressions, as well as capture smiles, among other things, using their smartphone cameras. This aids retail shops in lowering operating expenses, increasing product exposure, and making quicker decisions.
Blox.ai, another of its products, offers businesses machine vision and NLP- (Natural Language Processing) driven corporate solutions that address issues ranging from data organization and structure to prediction and personalization. This solution is leveraged predominately in education, entertainment, finance, and healthcare.
Niyati Agarwal, Morph.ai
Social media content and marketing have become instrumental parts of a business brand’s online visibility. To help companies with these, Morph.ai was founded by Niyati Agarwal (current Director Product and Strategy at Gupshup) and three coworkers in March 2016. Based in Gurgaon, Morph.ai has huge names like YES Bank, Estee Lauder, Yamaha, HSBC, and Manchester City Football Club among its core customers in less than two years of operation.
This B2B SaaS company enables marketers to utilize messaging as a marketing channel and create personalized interactions between businesses and consumers in order to generate up to double the high-quality leads with the same ad expenditure.
The Morph.ai chatbot achieves this by reaching out to a business’s potential consumers in real-time and automatically qualifies them with regular follow-ups, resulting in high-quality leads for the brand. Morpha.ai also allows for chat-based content marketing, where it segments and targets a brand’s audience to offer them engaging tailored content from the brand’s newsletters, YouTube, Blog, and other content channels and help lead conversion.
