Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)—two buzzwords that have taken the tech industry by storm these days. While the Interim Budget 2019 has spoken about a proposal to set up a National Centre for AI (NCAI) and a National AI Portal, with a ‘National Programme on AI’ spearheaded by NITI Aayog, the government has joined in the collective effort to harness the true potential of AI. But the question is: Are we as an industry equipped to adopt AI? Do we have the right skill sets?
Mate Labs is trying to make a difference here. This niche AI startup’s mission to bring AI & ML to masses ties into this national mission and is therefore poised to address some of these industry-wide issues. Having understood the pain points and tech challenges involved in the integration of AI, Mate Labs has created an ML platform, MateVerse, to help automate the process of building and training ML models.
Rahul Vishwakarma, CEO, and founder, Mate Labs, says, “I started my career in AI and ML by taking up projects for related companies. I soon came to realise that most companies were either unsure of how to go about adopting AI or found the process complicated and time-consuming. There was a clear and definite large industry need for faster, cheaper and easily implementable AI as well as ML application. This is especially true in the case of non-technology based companies or organisations without the resources to transform quickly.”
With a vision to bring ML to the masses, Vishwakarma started Mate Labs in 2016. “We created MateVerse, our flagship product, with the sole purpose of simplifying the entire process of building and training ML models, simple enough to be used by someone who doesn’t know a single line of code. Our product is so versatile that it can be used by both beginners and evolved users. For data scientists and analysts who spend several weeks pre-processing data, MateVerse serves as a one-stop-solution to many problems.”
Globally, Mate Labs has built a strong and organic user base of 10,000-plus in the last three years. “Our product, MateVerse, is used by CXOs and VPs, data analytics firms, analysts and data scientists from across sectors and several Fortune 500 companies. We have helped users reduce man-hour costs by increasing their bottom-line. Also, we are the winners of Nasscom Emerge 50 Award 2018 in the Deeptech category,” he says.
Mate Labs started off as a bootstrapped company and recently raised $550,000 seed funding from lead investor Omphalos Ventures India LLP in September 2018. This seed funding also saw participation from other investors, including Eagle 10 Ventures, 91Springboard, Deepak Sharma (ex-chairman of CITI Bank), Khattar Holding, Sumit Sinha, and Tejan Timblo among others. Sachin Unni, the partner at Zeroth.AI and a serial entrepreneur, is a mentor and investor at Mate Labs.
“With our end-to-end automated platform, users will be able to reduce the time to build by 70-80% thereby freeing up the time to focus on other business priorities,” says Vishwakarma. “We have just launched the advanced enterprise version of our product targeting medium as well as large companies in the BFSI and retail sectors in India. Along with augmenting businesses with AI capabilities, our product also helps businesses handle their data and equips them with the tools to train a model on it,”