Business
When Ananth Nagaraj founded his first company, he did it to make a positive impact in India. Sadly, his first startup, 300 Feet Eco Solutions, did not survive. What did survive, however, was Ananth's desire to improve India. He decided to tackle another problem by creating an AI-powered ASR (automated speech recognition) engine, Gnani.ai. Ananth Nagaraj started his first company in order to clean up Bangalore. He imagined a country where, in major cities, there were dustbins located every 300 feet, so that people had no excuse to litter. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to scale this startup, and ended up shutting it down and getting a job instead. Even though 300 Feet Eco Solutions didn't work out, Ananth still wanted to improve India somehow. One day, he realized that people living in rural areas of India had no way of getting information easily. Comprehensive, high-speed mobile network coverage wasn't available in these rural areas, people didn't have smartphones which could be used to look things up on Google, and even if they did, many of them could not read and write. As a result of this realization, Ananth decided to create an AI powered speech recognition engine so that people could make a call and get the answers that they were looking for, without needing to type or rely on mobile data. Of course, building such an engine was no easy task, which is why nobody else had done it. Specifically, Ananth wanted to make an engine which could handle multiple vernacular Indian languages, and with multiple accents as well. Eventually though, they were able to accomplish this, and to their surprise, when they benchmarked their engine against other engines, Gnani.ai outperformed all of its competition.Very quickly, word got around that Gnani.ai had built an AI-powered speech recognition engine. They quickly started getting clients who used Gnani.ai in a variety of different industries such as the banking industry, automotive industry, and agricultural industry. The success of the startup caught the eye of Samsung Ventures. In mid-2019, they invested $8.5 million in four Indian startups, and Gnani.ai was one of those startups.Today, the company has several prominent customers, and looks forward to sell their SaaS speech recognition solution to even more companies here in India. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to know more about Gnani.ai or Ananth Nagaraj, please make use of the links below: Gnani.ai's website: https://gnani.ai/Ananth's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ananth-nagaraj-72762616/Ananth's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ananth_nagaraj