10 Emerging Analytics Startups In India To Watch Out for in 2018
Analytics is permeating our lives in larger ways than we can think. With most companies turning to data companies, the demand for tools and resources that can make sense of the piling data has increased many folds. Hence enter our innovative startups, that are gracing various sections of industry, be it agritech, supply chain, manufacturing and others, offering analytics and enterprise AI based solutions, to meet their needs. Listing 10 such emerging analytics startups in India, we bring a comprehensive list of startups that are offering exceptional solutions to the data driven organisations. It presents a detailed picture of the startups in terms of its founding team, solutions they offer, growth story, employee strength, funding and others. Here’s the list in alphabetical order. Read our last year’s list here. 1. Analytic edge, Founded 2012 Analytic Edge Team The team: Founded by Santosh Nair, Vijay Ramaswamy and Rahul Budhraja. With 75+ years combined experience in marketing analytics and consulting, they have worked with companies across the globe in multiple verticals. Funding: They have not yet sought funding but plan to do so for growth capital. The company and its analytics solutions: It provides technology-enabled analytics solutions in marketing & sales effectiveness, integrating technology, industry knowledge and machine learning analytics to deliver actionable, scalable, cost-efficient and real-time marketing insights. Their key analytics solutions are marketing mix modelling, digital attribution, pricing & promotion strategy, sales forecasting and customer loyalty analytics. Employee strength: 40 The differentiation factor: Their key differentiator lies in the fact that they offer “technology-enabled” analytics solutions that are not “black boxes”. They have developed an end-to-end, cloud-based platform that clients can leverage for all the phases of a marketing mix modelling project. The platform coupled with automated data ingestion enables the clients to continuously measure the effectiveness of their marketing activities and provides insights that are real-time and actionable. It also allows them to scale the analytics, cost-efficiently. The growth story: They have grown rapidly over the last couple years on the strength of their marketing analytics products. Today, they support several Fortune 500 clients globally with marketing analytics. 2. CropIn, Founded 2010 CropIn Team The team: Founded by Krishna Kumar (CEO), Kunal Prasad (COO), Chittaranjan Jena (CTO). The founders have years of experience in the technology and management arena, and have had illustrious career in the corporate world. Funding: CropIn has raised a funding of 4 million USD till date. Their institutional investment partners are BEENEXT, Ankur Capital, BSP Fund LLC. The company and its analytics solutions: Cropin is a leading agri-tech company based in Bangalore that provides SaaS based services to agribusinesses globally. The idea of founding it came to Krishna Kumar after observing the agrarian crisis in the rural areas of Karnataka in 2010. As the farmers were dealing with non availability of finance, climatic vagaries, pest infestation and diseases, he took a resolution on doing his bit to prevent farmers’ misery. Thus came Cropin that enables its clients to analyse & interpret data and derive real time actionable insights on standing crop and projects spanning geographies, by harnessing cutting edge technologies like big data analytics, artificial intelligence, geo-tagging and satellite monitoring. It offers solutions such as: SmartFarm, a flexible farm management solution enabling complete digitisation of farms and empowering data-driven decision-making. SmartRisk, an agri-business intelligence solution leveraging agri-alternate data and providing risk mitigation and forecasting for effective credit risk assessment, using proprietary machine learning algorithms. Mwarehouse, a comprehensive solution providing Farm to fork traceability & compliance, quality control and flexible inventory management. SmartSales, a comprehensive CRM & input channel management solution. AcreSquare, a unique farmer application that helps companies interact directly with their farmers, share content, educate them and provide consultation. Employee strength: 90+ The differentiator factor: Some of the key features of Cropin’s solutions are AI and ML based proprietary algorithms, satellite monitoring, weather analytics for agri tech industry. It ensures 100% data security, complete traceability from farm to fork, risk mitigation, sales prediction and improvement, amongst others. The growth story: CropIn has so far digitised over 3 million acres of farmland, enriching the lives of 10,00,000 + farmers while working with 135+ clients. Its global clientele includes McCain, Syngenta, Ned Coffee, Mahindra, Mars, IDH, Marico, Tata, Godfrey Phillips, McCain, IFB Agro, ITC, ICICI Lombard, BigBasket, Welspun, World Bank and many more.The company has had a year-on-year revenue growth of 2x and crossing 3X growth this year. 3. GyanData, Founded 2011 Gyan Data Team The team: Founded by Prof. Shankar Narasimhan, Prof. Rengaswamy and Prof. Venkat Venkatasubramanian. They are experienced academicians from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and Columbia University, who bring in a wealth of domain expertise and knowledge. Funding: They have been bootstrapped till now with seed funding from founders, and are now reaching out to investors who can propel the business and help take it through the growth phase. The company and its analytics solutions: With a mission to empower the business ecosystem of clients with value-added services using data analytics, they have worked in both continuous and discrete manufacturing domains offering a wide range of enterprise applications right from conceptualisation of an idea to offering a fully developed product. Their portfolio includes projects for the defence, pharma, chemical, finance, healthcare, sea navigation and CRM domains and was started with a vision to translate the founders’ experience in R&D and industrial consultancy in areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, first-principles modelling, fault diagnosis and process analytics to manufacturing practice. Their key offerings are in manufacturing analytics (data pre-processing, predictive and prescriptive analytics, modelling and real time optimisation, preventive maintenance, smart manufacturing, IoT), supply chain solutions, text analytics, CRM analytics, financial analytics, image processing, healthcare analytics Employee strength: 30 The differentiator factor: They use domain agnostic algorithms that can be deployed across multiple domains. Other differentiating factors are ability to work with manufacturing (dirty) data, use of open source tools and platforms that offer their clients cost advantage, a rich pool of highly talented resources drawn primarily from premier institutes, amongst others. The growth story: As a start-up, they believe that they are moving from a solutions development and consolidation phase to a period of peak growth. Some of their clients include BHEL, BPCL, DRDO, Honeywell, Tata Steel, Dr.Reddy’s Lab, Mitsubishi Electric, Hinduja Tech, Pfizer etc. 4. IQLECT, Founded 2012 Sachin Sinha, Founder, IQLECT The team: Founded by Sachin Sinha. He is also the author of BangDB – a key-store NoSQL DB. Prior to IQLECT Sachin has worked as CTO of Jabong, Co-founder & CTO of Limeroad and in engineering leadership roles at Microsoft and Amazon. Funding: IQLECT has raised $3M in Seed funding round led by Exfinity Ventures. The company and its analytics solutions: IQLECT provides platform for real-time big data analytics. In addition, there is an app store with ready-made solutions that can be deployed on the platform. With a focus on real-time and predictive analytics, the offering from IQLECT can be availed through SaaS or On-premises. While working for the large corporations & startups alike, Sinha noticed that data volumes were increasing rapidly. In addition to that, the analysis of data is always done in isolation in terms of business operation. Each team used different tools for data extraction & analysis. This siloed approach of analysing data means that correlation of insights across departments and teams were always a major challenge. Not to forget, the data analysis process and collection of insights were done long after actionable opportunities were over. This gave birth to IQLECT, where the IQLECT platform can collect data from any different source and analyse them at one place in real-time. Key analytics solutions offered by IQLECT can be categorised in three buckets. Clickstream/ E-commerce/ Web-analytics solutions Log parsing & analytics solutions Device/ Sensors/ application monitoring & analytics solutions Employee strength: 15 The differentiator factor: They have following differentiators compared to the current market solutions: truly real time, avoids and breaks silos giving much lower latency and higher throughput, accelerated time to market, integrated ML and AI framework, cost optimisation and others. The growth story: IQLECT offers its platform and solutions through two channels – SaaS & Enterprise. The SaaS growth has been at 20% MoM, and some its clients on the enterprise front include Accenture, CISCO, SAP and a few notable data centers. 5. Lymbyc, Founded 2012 Lymbyc Team The team: Founded by Satyakam Mohanty and Ashish Rishi. Mohanty aka Chief Light Bulb is a market researcher at heart. He is a MICA graduate who chooses to view the entire insights spectrum through a technology lens. Ashish Rishi aka The Touchstone has a craving for technology that is insatiable. With analytics journey across GE and HSBC, he is also a MICA graduate who is constantly striving to make all these ideas come alive. Funding: Lymbyc has been bootstrapped from the beginning, with initial investments from the founding team. They are looking to raise growth capital soon to take Lymbyc to the rest of the world, starting with North America. The company and its analytics solutions: Previously known as Ma Foi Analytics, the company was founded to build robust analytical products that melded advanced technology to strong data science foundations. It was conceptualised with a vision to empower business leaders at the point of decision making and to elevate analytics from just being a validation resource to an intervention mechanism with foresight. It is headquartered in Bangalore with clients across India, US, Singapore and in the Middle East. It provides business leader an ultimate 24*7 available virtual data scientist—system that can take in queries in natural language and provide insightful answers at the point of decision making. Lymbyc aims to become the JARVIS (remember Ironman?) to the modern enterprise. Their virtual data scientist is called Lymbyc, which is a license based product and the first two use cases lie in marketing research/ consumer insights and pharma & life sciences marketing. They are looking to add additional use cases this year, focused within sales, marketing and commercial functions. Employee strength: 52 The differentiator factor: Lymbyc is world’s first integrated expert system, and have invented and patent applied for MIRA (Machine Intelligence for Research & Analytics), their own querying language, which enables to not only tag and identify the contextually relevant data items but also trigger the appropriate set of actions to convert them into insights in the same step. The startup believes that this is a generation ahead of any such solution world-wide. The growth story: Lymbyc has grown from pillar to pillar in the last six years. They have been able to divert their profits towards product development and still maintain profitability. They have a 73%+ CAGR in revenue since inception, and their major clients are from Fortune 100 spanning industries across consumer technology, healthcare, pharma & e-commerce. 6. Razorthink, Founded 2015 The team: Gary Oliver (Chairman & CEO), Dr. Nandu Nandakumar (CTO), Murali Mahalingam (Chief Strategy Officer), Tom Drotleff (CFO), Harsha Nutalapati (GM India, SVP of Service & Support), Barbara Reichert (VP Marketing), Rupesh Rao (Head of Customer Success). They are passionate leaders with decades of experience in advanced enterprise analytics. Funding: Razorthink is funded by individual angel investors. They did not disclose the amount of funding or investors. The company and its analytics solutions: Razorthink Inc. is an Enterprise AI Systems company that powers organisations with deep learning intelligent systems. Razorthink BigBrain, a rapid AI system development platform, empowers AI teams to create purpose-built intelligent systems that solve complex business problems. It enables them to accelerate the creation of AI solutions through BigBrain’s unique combination of data science automation, dynamic learning models, deployment automation and built-in optimisation for high performance computing. Customer predictions, recommendations, intelligent process automation, fraud detection, risk management and AI-assisted customer service, are some areas it can be deployed. The company believes that businesses in almost every industry find themselves at the risk of digital disruption. As organisations are re-thinking business strategies and looking to strengthen their competitive advantage, AI driven insights, decisions and processes have become more prominent. By applying AI to data science, the Razorthink BigBrain platform powers enterprises with Expert AIs that drive superior decisions, highly efficient processes and ideal outcomes. Expert AIs are specifically formulated and continually optimised to solve business problems that contain complex data analysis. Expert AIs use the combined power of data science automation, machine learning, deep neural networks, anecdotal learning, automated feature recognition, embedded domain expertise and high performance computing to: Uncover insights never before possible Help businesses avoid blind spots Recommend actions that alter outcomes Dramatically increase efficiencies Employee strength: 100 (across United States and India) The differentiator factor: At Razorthink, they offer more than just a technology platform, as they have the expertise to help organisations solve business problems by applying AI to specific areas and processes within the organisation to impact outcomes. Unlike simple AI data modelling tools, Razorthink BigBrain supports the entire AI solution lifecycle, including data preparation, model building, model deployment and continuous optimisation. BigBrain also accelerates data modelling through a unique visual drag and drop model builder. The growth story: When the team announced the Razorthink BigBrain platform on October 16, 2017, it was the first Deep Learning Data Science Automation Platform. Their customers include large banks, insurance companies and other financial services firms as well as telecoms in the U.S. and India. 7. The Math company, Founded 2016 Aditya Kumbakonam The team: Founded by Sayandeb Banerjee, Aditya Kumbakonam and Anuj Krishna. With decades of analytical experience to deploy complex data driven solutions, they have built and scaled teams for Fortune 500 organisations across 10+ industries. During this journey, they have designed strong data science strategies, played lead roles in establishing successful hiring practices and training programs for over 3,000 data scientists. Funding: They are currently a fully bootstrapped organisation. The company and its analytics solutions: TheMathCompany is in the business of transforming organisations and ensuring viable growth journeys that result in true measurable impact. They are dedicated to enable the way organisations define and execute their analytics strategy. Accounting for different maturity levels, they focus on building capability and providing execution support for clients by having adaptive engagement models. Sayandeb Banerjee With the growing demand for data driven decision making, organisations are starting to realise the value in establishing their own analytics capabilities. The co-founders realised there was a gap in the market in enabling companies to embark on this journey. Although there are some service providers that aid in components of the journey, no one was providing an end-to-end partnership to these enterprises. TheMathCompany was founded to help bridge this unfulfilled gap. They engage in deep partnerships with customers to design the long-term analytics strategy as well as implement this mandate. They are dedicated to solve the most challenging problems end-to-end by leveraging years of domain expertise, design thinking, statistics, machine learning and visualisations. Throughout this process, the focus is on creating Centre of Excellence(s) to make these organisations self-sufficient in analytics. Employee strength: 50+ Anuj Krishna The differentiator factor: Currently, there are multiple service providers, consultants and platform-based enablers in the market. However, TheMathCompany is not just another analytics service provider, as they take pride in being the only organisation to provide all these services end-to-end, addressing the analytical needs of enterprises holistically. The growth story: In their short journey, they have seen a steady growth both in terms of revenue and clientele. We have been fortunate to work with 15+ Fortune 500 clients across 4 continents. This includes one of the top 3 retailers in the world, the world’s largest alcoholic beverages company and one of the largest insurance providers in the US and Australia. 8. Tredence, Founded 2012 The team: Founded by Shub Bhowmick (CEO), Sumit Mehra (CTO), and Shashank Kumar Dubey (Head of Analytics). Funding: Tredence has been bootstrapped by the founders and generates enough cash that is invested back in the business. They have not accepted any external investments yet. The company and its analytics solutions: Headquartered in San Jose (CA), they have delivery centre in Bangalore. It is an analytics services and solutions company delivering competitive advantages via data insights to leading Fortune 500 companies. Their capabilities range across data management, data visualisation, advanced analytics, big data set up, and machine learning. The company has global presence across 9 locations including US, Canada, Australia and India, serving clients across industries. Tredence provides white-box, analytics driven technology solutions, designed to empower frontline managers to make informed business decisions. They specialise across all key areas of the data analytics spectrum: data engineering & management, data science, and data visualisation. These full stack solutions are built on the power of AI and ML algorithms – in combination with a variety of big data technologies – making it simple, smart, and visual to use. Employee strength: 235+ The differentiator factor: They have been recognised by some of their clients as the most indispensable analytics partner, as they leverage well-oiled ecosystem of consulting, technology, advanced analytics and visualisation to build customised solutions for clients. These are designed to enable clients consume insights at scale, with the least amount of manual intervention. They ensure smooth implementation and adoption of the solution across the decision value chain, helping clients measure business impact and drive pervasiveness. The growth story: With their own share of troubles, once they hit the acceleration pace, there has been no looking back. They have grown in revenue a 100% YOY, and have over 25 clients spread across industries. 9. 3LOQ, Founded 2012 The team: Founded by Anirudh Shah and Sunil Motaparti. While both have a degree from Carnegie Mellon, Shah has worked extensively with machine learning and NLP for over a decade and Motaparti is analytical with a keen interest in marketing and advertising and builds technology to make messaging more relevant and engaging. Funding: 3LOQ is funded by Bitkemy Ventures, a Hyderabad-based tech incubator-cum-seed fund that was setup by Sunil Motaparti in 2012. It is planning to raise a new round of funding in 2018. The company and its analytics solutions: The company is building machine learning algorithms to increase customer engagement and reduce attrition. 3LOQ leverages consumer psychology and big data to create unique personalised interfaces that enable habit formation amongst target consumers. Currently it is focused on implementing Habitual AI solutions to solve challenges in the financial sector. 3LOQ started out by enabling companies to crunch billions of customer transactions to extract revenue-related business intelligence. They honed machine learning algorithms to reduce attrition through habit formation, leveraging consumer psychology and data wizardry. They’ve used Habitual AI to automatically and securely personalise financial customer communication like never before in: Digital banking, accelerating adoption of digital services like net banking. Primary banking, recommending banking products that are most likely to result in customers choosing a particular financial institution as their primary bank. Card/Payments, finding and recommending merchants and categories that a customer is most likely to buy from using a bank’s credit card. Employee strength: 15 The differentiator factor: Its Habitual AI is a platform that enables banks to learn their customers, suggest personalised feature recommendations and lead them towards building a habit of using a product more frequently. The robust, universal platform handles structured and unstructured data ingestion from any source, at several TBs per day. It runs on commodity hardware and lives up to its enterprise-grade stamp with built-in fault tolerance, high availability, and horizontal scalability. The growth story: After working for clients across a wide gamut of sectors like telecom, retail and e-commerce for 3 years, 3LOQ saw an opportunity in the banking and finance sector. They’re currently focusing on this sector and HDFC is one of their major clients in India. They also started projects with other Indian banks and their goal is to onboard at least 5 major Indian banks in 2018. 10. Turing Analytics, Founded 2015 The team: Founded by Aditya Patadia and Divyesh Patel. With MBA and relevant industry experience, they were passionate about indigenously developing machine learning based business solutions. Funding: Turing Analytics had raised seed funding from Private Investors in July 2016. The company and its analytics solutions: Inspired by Alan Turing, the father of AI, Turing Analytics is driven by a vision to develop solutions powered by machine learning to help businesses make data driven decisions. They deliver visual search & recommendation solutions to both online and offline retailers, helping them improve product discovery, customer engagement and boost conversion rates. The founders back in 2015 were convinced that machine learning is the technology of future and decides to create products that could solve business problems using ML. They identified that Indian ecommerce websites were not able to unlock full potential  of customer reviews as off-the-shelf NLP engines were not good enough in Indian context. Hence they created a NLP engine that worked for Indian English as well as Hinglish. This innovation was used to create “Customer Review Analytics System”. Their key analytics solutions are: Visual search that enables users to search items using photos! It can identify the right items being searched without cropping or category selection. Similar product recommendation, suggesting similar looking items from a catalog. Fashion trend recognition, where they have developed a neural network based AI system which can identify what is trending among customers and suggest which products should be pushed. Image recognition and tagging, where they train customised image recognition models as per client requirements. Customer review analytics, which is a product to classify online customer reviews into actionable set of buckets e.g. packaging, shipping, product quality, price etc. Employee strength: 7 and hiring for expansion to overseas markets. The differentiator factor: They can utilise all types of data (text, image, video etc.) for training neural networks and hence, there is no industry or sector limitation to their products. They can work for fashion or home furnishing with equal efficiency as for medical images and patent search. The growth story: Two months after the inception they got their first & oldest running client Shopclues.com for “Customer Review analytics”. Since then, they have ventured into visual search and product recommendations solutions, garnering clients not just from India but abroad. Some of them are TATA Group, Kimberley Clark, Future group C&D Labs.
Analytics is permeating our lives in larger ways than we can think. With most companies turning to data companies, the demand for tools and resources that can make sense of the piling data has increased many folds. Hence enter our innovative startups, that are gracing various sections of industry, be it agritech, supply chain, manufacturing […]
Analytics India Magazine brings a comprehensive list of 10 analytics startups that are offering exceptional solutions to the data driven organisations. It presents a detailed picture of the startups in terms of its founding team, solutions they offer, growth story, employee strength, funding and others.
["cloud adoption in emerging markets"]
["data science", "machine learning", "artificial intelligence", "AI", "neural network", "ML", "cloud adoption in emerging markets", "NLP", "Aim", "deep learning", "analytics"]
["AI", "artificial intelligence", "machine learning", "ML", "deep learning", "neural network", "NLP", "data science", "analytics", "Aim"]
Srishti currently works as Associate Editor at Analytics India Magazine. When not covering the analytics news, editing and writing articles, she could be found reading or capturing thoughts into pictures.