An Ex-Tinder For IITians, Now Artivatic Is A B2B AI Company

Layak Singh founder and CEO of Artivatic has pivoted business from B2C to B2B, largely to do something more meaningful but also to save on the dastardly expenses of running a consumer internet company. Perhaps third time relaunch will be the magic charm.

Artivatic 101: The introduction

Artivatic evolved from our last startup, Cogxio. And before that Cogxio used to be called DateIITian.

DateIITian was an online dating platform for IITians and helped people connect and materialized many a movie and dinner date.

In July 2016, we completely shut down Cogxio and pivoted our technology to a more serious side. An artificial intelligence (AI) powered, B2B, computer vision enterprise platform for enabling real time better automated decision making.

Now Artivatic is completely a B2B platform and we have 3 products:

1. AI as an infrastructure for developers and startups
2. AI as a service for enterprises
3. AI as an operating system (OS) for building IoT/smart devices (In process)

What’s special about Artivatic?

We are working on algorithms which finger-print each user’s behaviour according to several meta dimensions.

With this technology, given a certain user’s interactions on one domain, and generalized user interaction data in a new domain we are able to predict the specific user’s behaviour on the new domain.

This requires a new class of algorithms which do not know the final dimensional of the regression space while it continues to learn. The algorithms are expected to perform on extremely sparse data.

What is the market size and opportunity?

Multiple billions.

According to UBM Watson, the cognitive economy will be worth 7 trillion dollars by 2021. The personalized decision making market is more than 200 billion dollars and the AI enabler market is worth 30 billion dollars by 2018.

How are you different from existing competitors?

Artivatic does not have too many direct competitors in India. There is one American company called Qloo but that only provides second degree cross intelligence whereas Artivatic is end to end technology infrastructure powered with cross sector intelligence, 360 degree human intelligence and 16PF psychological analysis.

Some AI companies like Fractal, Caryon focus on vertical data analytics whereas Artivatic will focus on vertical decision making through horizontal intelligence.

Some of the big players like IBM Watson, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook provides the platform to build the technologies not the products.

Any business which needs to use these technologies will have to hire an engineering team to make the technology using the infrastructure provided by these big corporations. Artivatic tech can be used in one click directly without worrying about database, architecture, algorithm, intelligence, scaling, automated decision, unique dashboard, and more.

Artivatic is soon launching healthcare sector products exclusively to manage data intelligence on diseases, nutrition, wellness and patient data.

What is the funding status and monetization model?

Artivatic is a bootstrapper but we are currently raising funds to hire good talent for our research team.

About how we charge money, Artivatic charges a minimal 25 dollars for 5,000 API calls; in the pay as you go model, the first 10,000 API calls are free for lifetime. For big enterprises, we charge 25,000 dollars to 250,000 dollars a month based on the number of users.

What’s the biggest challenge in running a tech startup?

Acquiring good talent is tough. [publisher note – acquiring the funds to retain talent is also tough]

How has customer feedback been?

The response has been awesome. We are getting huge requests for use of our products, so far we already have 53 requests for use/demo of our products.

Great. So business is picking up well?

It has been fantastic. Though our final product is launched only next month, we already have 5 clients across education, healthcare, telecom, travel, social network, and ecommerce. We have even got interest from some Fortune 500 companies too.

The next year is going to be exciting and we aim to help more than 100 enterprises and 10,000 developers.

Speaking of future aims, what plans for expansion?

Our target is to first focus on the Indian market for the next 1 year (though our product has no geographical constraints) and then expand to USA followed by the Singapore market. There is huge demand there.

On the talent side, the target is to expand the technical and sales team by 50 till end of 2018.

What are your marketing plans?

We will explore promotions with PR, commission based marketing and working with accelerators.

However at present, we are focusing on our solid personal network of contacts as we have good network around. Following that we will look to partner with complementary businesses to integrate our technologies.

This is the third time you have rebranded. What has been the biggest learning so far?

To be more focused on first building the product using real life cases. As we learnt from the past, building AI products is not easy. You need an immense amount of expertise and investments.