Promising Indian AI startups to watch in 2023

The Artificial intelligence (AI) suite of technologies that include machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, image recognition, and natural language processing (NLP), to name a few, is undoubtedly transforming our individual lives and business models. The AI market in India, too, is showing a lot of promise. A joint study conducted by Microsoft and the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) expects this market to grow 20% in the next five years with a major part of this growth being attributed to private companies, and industry bodies in this domain. While we acknowledge that the list is not exhaustive, we have compiled a list of a few such entities that have stood out in 2022.

Staqu

Founded in 2015, Staqu is a Gurugram-headquartered AI startup. It delivers solutions for image recognition, audio-video analytics, and text processing. The company works closely with several private and public organisations, including police forces of multiple states, and was in fact responsible for the first facial recognition (FR) system used by a police force in India when its platform, called Jarvis, was used to build the Punjab Artificial Intelligence System (PAIS) back in 2020. The Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar Police have also been using Staqu’s proprietary technology since then. This year, Staqu raised ₹11 crore as part of its Pre-Series A funding round from Mount Judi Venture and SIS Limited. The company also registered 100% year-on-year growth in revenue along with an overall three times higher growth in two quarters (as on September 2022), co-founder Atul Rai said at the time.

Qure.ai 

Mumbai-based Qure.ai is a health-tech company founded in 2016. It offers AI-based decision support for medical images like X-Rays, ultrasounds, and CTs. Some of the products in the company portfolio are qXR. qER, and qCT-Lung. During the pandemic, Qure.ai worked with public organisations like the Oman Ministry of Health for patient monitoring; Mumbai’s municipal corporation for screening and monitoring Covid-positive cases; NHS Bolton in the UK for Covid detection. 

This year, the company, which serves customers across 50 countries, raised $40 million.

Conversational AI startups 

With Indian firms like Uniphore and Gupshup becoming unicorns in 2022 and late 2021, respectively, conversational AI has been among the most talked about use-cases of AI in the past year or so. It combines natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and other related technologies to engage users in human-like conversations, and has been said to have wide business use-cases, even if humans may not always enjoy talking to emotionless bots.

As per an August report from Gartner, the worldwide end-user spending on conversational AI solutions in contact centres — through which organizations manage their customer interactions — is expected to reach $1.99 billion in 2022. The report also said that by 2026, one in ten agent interactions will be automated. Haptik, which was acquired by billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio back in 2019, told Mint earlier this year that it was targeting $25 million annualized recurring revenue (ARR) by March 2023. More early stage firms, like Verloop, have also said that revenues have been boosted after the pandemic.

Think about the most groundbreaking technological innovations of the year and the conversational AI tool ChatGPT easily takes the cake. With the anticipation of further innovation in this field, companies are waking up to the vast benefits it has to offer. In April this year, Uniphore acquired artificial intelligence (AI)-powered knowledge automation solution company Colabo. This company helps in extracting information from structured and unstructured documents using AI.

Haptik, Gupshup, Uniphore, and Verloop are just some of the companies in the spotlight, but as far as conversational AI is concerned, this is a sector that investors are watching keenly.

Artpark 

Strictly speaking, Artpark is not a company. The AI and Robotics Technology Park (Artpark) is a not-for-profit foundation set up in 2020 by the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and AI Foundry in a public-private model. However, the organization has taken some notable steps in the two-years of its existence. ARTPARK is supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) which provided a seed fund of $22 million to the venture. This year, it joined hands with Google to unveil Project Vaani, which is an effort to bring together high-quality datasets in Indian languages. Artpark may not be a startup per se, but it seems highly likely that it will have an impact on the advancement of AI in India in the year(s) to come.