AI startup Peritus raises $2 mn to develop India biz

Artificial intelligence startup Peritus.ai has raised $2 million (Rs 12 crore) in funding from early-stage venture capital firm Ideaspring Capital and early-stage fund The Hive, a company statement said.

The firm will use the money to strengthen its development team in India, it said in the statement.

Based in California, US, Peritus.ai Inc. was founded by Santhosh Srinivasan and Kamesh Raghavendra in 2017 with support from The Hive, which incubates startups and focuses on applications of AI in the enterprise segment.

“We are looking forward to help from Ideaspring for support in building and guiding our development team in India,” said Srinivasan, co-founder and vice president for engineering at Peritus.ai.

The company automates professional services, support delivery and incident resolution for data centres. It leverages recent advancements in AI to automate and customise end-to-end service workflows. It also proactively predicts support needs and incident features from patterns mined across product designs, past incidents, configurations and log data, the statement said.

“Data centre growth over the last 15 years has created significant growing pain in data centre management. Tasks that once could be done manually by IT teams have hit the limits of scalability, cost, and efficiency and Peritus is solving that by automating it,” said Arihant Patni, managing director, Ideaspring Capital. The company claims that its solution reduces the support requirement by two-thirds.

Peritus.ai’s product is currently being deployed by leading data centre vendors and managed service providers, the company said with identifying the clients. Its competency in cognitive support transforms the economics of support delivery for enterprises, cloud service providers, and data centre system vendors, the statement added.

The Hive India was floated in September 2013 by Patni Computers’ scions Amit and Arihant Patni. It typically invests between $200,000 and $2 million in three to five companies a year and picks 20-40% stake in startups in return for the investment. It also backs startups at the idea-stage.

The fund invests in big data firms operating in multi-channel marketing, CRM, security, IT management, e-commerce, retail, advertising, media, financial services and insurance, telecom and healthcare.

Ideaspring is a Rs 125-crore early-stage fund launched in April 2016 by angel investors Naganand Dorasami and Prashant Deshpande along with Arihant and Amit Patni, among others. It invests in enterprise tech startups operating in the space of machine-learning and deep learning, computer vision and image processing, big data analytics, Internet of Things, augmented and virtual reality, health-tech and fin-tech.

The fund was looking achieve its first close of Rs 90 crore within a month of its launch. The fund invests up to $450,000 (around Rs 3 crore) in early-stage tech startups, besides participating in pre-Series A and Series A rounds where it pumps in up to $750,000 (around Rs 5 crore) as a co-investor.

It has four general partners, or GPs in industry parlance, including Infosys veterans V Balakrishnan (founder and chairman, Exfinity Venture Partners) and TV Mohandas Pai (chairman, Manipal Global Education Services and Aarin Capital), Rajiv C Mody (owner of Sasken Communication Technologies) and Amit Patni.

Doraswamy is managing director and CEO at Ideaspring while Arihant Patni and Deshpande are managing directors. Suryaprakash Konanuru is chief technology officer at the firm.

Some of its earlier bets include workflow management startup Zapty, augmented reality startup Whodat and enterprise networking startup Lavelle Networks.