This Start-up Offers Artificial Intelligence Solutions To Enhance Experiences, Aims To Tackle Analytics Challenge

For most of us, thinking machines happen to be sci-fi stuff, but for those working in the artificial intelligence (AI) space, that is just a ground reality. AI is slowly gaining traction among Indian entrepreneurs and a handful of companies are already working on one product or the other, targeting specific segments. But here is one brand new start-up which is hoping to open up this field and make it super easy for developers to incorporate AI components in their apps as per their requirements. Chennai-based Mad Street Den (interestingly, ‘MAD’ stands for Mind Abled Devices) will be offering easy-to-access AI solutions via a Cloud-based platform, thus delivering intelligence to the world, on a broad scale. The IA stack comprises sensory processing layers, as well as contextual binding layers, and aims to deliver three categories of consumer experiences.

But that does not mean lack of more intriguing products on the part of the start-up. Mad Street Den is all about intelligent innovation and the company is working intensely on a series of products using vision, speech and touch-based processing (among others), aiming to cater to verticals like gaming and entertainment, health and lifestyle, and security and analytics. Here is a snapshot that captures the start-up’s vision and viability.

Who runs Mad Street Den (www.madstreetden.com): A core team of four including co-founder & CEO Anand Chandrasekaran. Anand holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT-Madras and a PhD in Neuroscience from Baylor College of Medicine. During his Post Doctoral stint at Stanford, he specialised in Neuromorphic Engineering, building custom silicon chips that emulate various regions of the brain. At that time, Anand was part of the IBM team and working on DARPA’s SyNAPSE project (for the curious, let’s tell you this project focuses on building all sorts of smart hardware that emulate higher intelligence).

Prior to starting his own venture, Anand joined a Palo Alto-based start-up called Evolved Machines, Inc., as a research scientist and developed various neural algorithms that could connect to real-world sensory perceptions like vision and smell. “As part of Evolved Machines, I was involved in another DARPA project called Neovision2,” he recalls.

There are three others in the core team – another co-founder who has some very useful experience in designing products that use the machine learning approach; an experienced and distinguished professional with a similar background to Anand’s and another expert who builds the kind of network infrastructure the company requires. Although development work started in March this year (a month after Anand returned from Silicon Valley), the start-up was officially launched in August 2013 and has recently shifted its headquarters from Bangalore to Chennai.

What inspired the venture: During his stint at Evolved Machines, Anand decided that he would work on AI projects of his own. So he worked as a consultant with Zort Technologies for a couple of years while trying to figure out what to do next.

“Although building great AI is a good thing, we did realise that there were very few solutions in the market that would help create great consumer experience,” says Anand. “That’s because there is no unified platform that allows easy and cheap access to AI elements – no suitable infrastructure for handling the requirements of the applications using those elements. So we decided to create such a platform. That way, we can build a whole new ecosystem for everyone who wants to create new experiences enhanced by AI.”

What’s the pitch: Making machines more useful by making them a bit more human: Fun, intelligent and relevant. They will sense as babies, observe and play as youngsters, learn and change with you as they grow older. In brief, the start-up aims to provide AI support across three categories of experiences – fun and play, usefulness & convenience, and helpful & revealing. “Someday in the near future, we hope to bring everyday objects to life, not just the devices we use today,” the site notes.

How it works: Mad Street Den is in the business of delivering artificial intelligence to the world – in varied formats and across industries. The primary product is a Cloud-based AI platform that developers can leverage to incorporate AI components into their applications. This ‘MAD’ (Mind Abled Devices) stack currently focuses on vision-based applications and delivers elements such as facial gesture analysis, face recognition, gaze tracking and so on. However, the start-up will expand and diversify its offerings as the platform grows. As of now, the target sectors include apps, services industry, gaming and analytics (imagine test-marketing a product and getting insightful feedback through AI apps that can decode facial gestures of potential customers and correctly surmise their reaction to the product in question). But in the next few years, Mad Street Den may also develop low-cost custom hardware to support its existing stack; create high-end cognitive hardware for big enterprises/software companies and finally make foray into robotics.

“All these are in the pipeline and we intend to create more apps and new products by leveraging our own AI platform,” explains Anand. “That will further create new and wonderful experiences enhanced by our AI solutions and speak volumes about our quality.”

Claim to fame: Novelty of concept and the tremendous potential are the key factors at this point. Very few Indian start-ups are currently working in the AI space and it could be the next big thing when Web 3.0 – widely assumed to be a combination of artificial intelligence and the semantic Web – finally arrives.

Show me the money: Till date, the start-up has been bootstrapped and has not started earning revenues. As of now, the business model is essentially B2B, but Anand has high hopes about B2C earnings as the company is also building its own products. “We are a very early-stage company, completely self-funded and in the process of building our scalable infrastructure and our first B2C product (a game) by early next year. In fact, we will be demoing our prototype at MobileSparks 2013 in Bangalore tomorrow (December 14), he says.

“As we have many potential revenue streams, it is a little difficult to gauge the market size at present,” he observes. “But it spans everyone – from the college dorm developer to small product companies, to service providers and OEMs who want to enhance their offerings. Even large corporations might want their own custom stacks and proprietary AI elements,” he adds.

Although bootstrapped, Mad Street Den is not looking to raise funds just now. “We intend to work on our product pipeline first and come up with 1-3 more products by mid-2014,” says Anand. “Once we have the process in play and are getting considerable traction at consumer and enterprise levels, approaching investors will make sense. Also, we have gone past the incubation stage now. Neither are we limited to a single platform or product. Therefore, we will be looking at a very large angel round or maybe a small Series A within a year, depending on our requirements. Given our R&D requirements, we would like to expand our operations to the US as well.”

Biggest challenge: Competition is always there as several companies are working in the AI space – both in India and abroad. But the field is vast and almost completely untapped; so there is space for everyone. “Currently, there’s no delivery model like our Cloud platform, especially in the vision space. So that gives us some competitive edge and we are building the rest of the USP,” concludes Anand.