Talk with Abhishek Mishra & Ritabrata Bhaumik, Co-founders of Aindra Labs

My recent interview with Abhishek Mishra & Ritabrata Bhaumik , Co-Founders of Aindra Labs, one of the Top 10 Artificial Intelligence Start-ups in India creating Computer-Vision (CV) and Machine-Learning (ML) based products and incubated in Santiago, Start-up Chile, one of the World’s top Accelerators for the most disruptive Global Start-ups.

Also, read: Artificial Intelligence vs. Machine Learning: What’s the main difference?

 Q. What was the Mission and Vision of your company?

Use technology to create products that have a deep impact on the society. We use Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision to create those products.

 Q. What Technology was implemented by your company? 

Our ability to process images captured from real life scenarios using day to day image capturing devices like Smartphones, Tablets, Surveillance cameras etc all the way to high-end Drones on our Visual Analytics Platform based on our patent pending Computer Vision and Machine Leaning Technologies.

 Q. So what is the major product that you have come up with?

SmartIdentification is a Smart phone based risk analysis solution which uses computer vision algorithms to automates the entire risk profiling process using our visual analytics platform.

The challenge for Insurance industries in Indian and other geographies is to determine the insurance premium which is based on the risk profile of the property. The brokers or field-officers are sent to the property to audit and verify the estate and infrastructure. This becomes a significant expenditure to Insurance companies in terms of the time and the cost spent by the officers to travel to these properties. Hence, our solution automates this process and enables Insurance company to scale their business by saving significant time and money spent in manual processes.

 Q. What is the Current Target Segment?

• General Insurance Companies in India

 Q. How big is the Potential Market of the company?

General Insurance Companies in Dubai, Singapore, Canada, Europe & Malaysia.

 Q. What are the challenges faced by Insurance companies that your company are addressing with AI technology?

Our client, few of the biggest Insurance companies in India, are in the business to provide insurance services to various assets like Buildings, Warehouses, Storage Areas, etc. In order to provide insurance, they need their skilled surveyors to visit and examine the insurable assets in detail to assess the risk and decide on the insurance premium accordingly. Evaluating the risk profile by correctly identifying all the elements in the insurable asset that have a bearing on the risk, is naturally the most critical component of the job. Any incorrect evaluation of the risk profile have a very serious implication for our client as it may cause huge business loss and can even potentially wipe out the entire business if it results in honouring a fraudulent claim where the insured amount is very large. Unfortunately there is no cost-efficient and scalable mechanism currently available to evaluate risk profile of insurable assets like Buildings, Warehouses, Storage Areas, etc. for the following reasons:

•  The number of skilled surveyors available to our client is inadequate compared to their business volume, so the bandwidth available to their skilled surveyors is limited.
• The cost of time for skilled surveyors is high as these skills are not easily available in the market
• The scope of human error remains high even for skilled surveyors.
• Sometimes there is collusion between skilled surveyors and the insured party and due to the corrupt practices, incorrect risk profiling is deliberately done or fraudulent claims get approved, resulting in loss to our client.
• Many of these insurable assets are spread out is remote areas or high-cost locations and our client needs to incur a significant cost for the boarding, travel and lodging of skilled surveyors in these locations.

 Q. How did you overcome the challenges faced?

We worked closely with client personnel to physically visit several of these assets like Warehouses, Storage Areas, etc. to understand how the count and easy accessibility of some of the specified objects of interest like Fire Extinguishers, Smoke Detectors, No Smoking signs, Fire Exit signs, etc have a big bearing on evaluation of the Risk Profile, and thereby determining insurance premium for that asset. After understanding the requirements of risk profiling well, based on our expertise in Artificial Intelligence (primarily Computer Vision & Machine Learning) we then developed a smartphone-based solution that can identify and count those specified objects of interest. Data is captured by the application we developed running on smartphones which is later pushed to our cloud server for processing and analysis. This data can be sliced and diced in different user-friendly formats in the web portal and as softcopy reports, and is auditable by human eye due to images getting captured by our Application. The application we developed for our client does not need real-time internet connectivity at point of capture and gets automatically pushed to cloud server once internet connectivity is restored, and hence worked well where insurable assets are located in remote locations where internet connectivity may not be present.

 Q. How your company leveraging AI (especially Computer Vision and Machine Learning) Technology to bring impact in Indian Insurance Industry space?

The usage of our novel solution had a transformative effect on our client in the following ways :-

• As the application is easy to use and user-friendly, even a non-skilled person can use the Application to identify and count the specified objects of interest like Fire Extinguishers, Smoke Detectors, No Smoking signs, etc. and evaluate risk profile of the insured asset based on business rules. This reduced the dependence of our client on skilled surveyors to risk profile the assets, thereby saving money and skilled surveyor bandwidth which are very precious resources.
• The data captured by our application is auditable by human eye due to images getting captured by our Application and also captures geo-location data for objects of interest, thereby reducing the scope of human error or corrupt collusion between surveyors and insured parties significantly.
• The application we developed does not need real-time internet connectivity at point of capture and gets automatically pushed to cloud server once internet connectivity is restored, and hence worked well where insurable assets are located in remote locations where internet connectivity may not be present. This reduced the need for sending skilled surveyors in remote locations, thereby reducing cost for our client significantly.
• No capital expenditure (Capex) was needed from the client as our solution works with everyday usage devices like smartphones.
• All the factors combined led to quick and easy data-driven decision making and an automated cost-effective scalable solution.

Q. How well has your company got the media coverage?

Featured on many magzines and newspaper like economictimes etc.