Here’s how our unconventional funding story goes. Job Philip and Nitin Jain (both IIT alumni) had a start-up idea.
They build a prototype. Invite the best of men they know to form the core team. They bootstrap. They network.
They convert high profile clients. Hypergrowth follows. They don’t pitch to investors. Their clients offer to invest.
You will hear about start-up stories who started small, but made an impact after a funding round. You will also hear of VC funded start-ups who launched with a big bang. Start-ups that succeed, and start-ups that fail. But the story of Mumbai based Start-up Assert AI’s $2 million funding isn’t your typical funding story.
We began the Assert AI journey in 2018. In no time, we were one of the largest AI teams operating in India; developing AI based solutions for almost every sector and domain.
We built a small set of loyal customers. High profile customers. Customers who made the survival of a bootstrapped start-up working on an evolving technology sustainable. Every day was so thrilling.
Our AI solutions for workflow automation, security & surveillance, health & safety compliance, footfall monitoring and bay analytics are matchless. They are also getting better with every passing day, thanks to our AI engineers working day in and day out at our research centre at Bangalore.
The part where we evolve
We knew we were building something super cool using artificial intelligence and deep learning. But we had not anticipated the way we grew soon after. Our clients loved the customized algorithms we built for them; directly addressing the challenges faced by them, be it workflow, resource management, security or health and safety compliance.
We saw a huge adoption within large organizations where a security teams could be reduced by 70%, workflow automation reduced the overall workforce requirement and human errors could be eliminated up to 99%. Our solutions are not only suitable to be adopted across large organizations by multiple teams and functions, but also automation-centric small teams to empower them with AI.
This changed everything for us. While, we’ve been adding innovative use cases to our kitty at a heady pace, we are far from keeping up with the speed at which our growing customer base wants us to enhance our solutions.
Our unconventional funding story
Now is the part that makes our funding story unconventional- Our clients not only loved and consumed our solutions, they referred to their peers, and also offered to invest in our start-up. That’s the level of certitude they show towards our team and our product. It is a proud moment for us, not just for the funds we receive, but more so, for the source the funding comes from.
We have become a business enablement tool for our clients in a wide set of functions. Be it logistics and warehousing, security, resource management, workflow automation, quality assurance, or business intelligence. This translates to various requirements explicit to their diverse business functions. Our real-time use cases like facial recognition-based attendance, automated inventory management, object detection, tracking and counting, automatic number plate reading, intrusion detection, and AI drone-based solutions continue to remain the most popular among our clients. But our clients had more requirements, because if you don’t want more, you will seldom get more. We need to deliver on those specific requirements if we are to continue delivering on our promise of empowering businesses with AI.
We also deeply believe AI Vision is much more than a visual inspection tool.
It is an automation system full of potential to improve workflow for every department of an organization.
The kind of functionality, adoption, and ROI that we have seen for our AI solutions makes us feel confident. We’re very well placed to make AI vision a prominent component for every business that’s determined to scale. We need to stay innovative, aggressive, get faster, and better with each passing moment, just like the technology we work with.
Today, we’re announcing our $2 Million fundraise from industry veteran Prashant Purker, ex- MD & CEO of ICICI Venture, and Arya Vision, a subsidiary of Arya.ag.
Prashant Purker, Ex- MD & CEO of ICICI Venture, the lead equity investor feels, “Assert AI has developed cutting edge AI technology that has the potential to solve a multitude of industry problems.”
Prasanna Rao, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Arya.ag said, “Assert AI is uniquely placed to solve customer needs around video analytics. In fragmented agri value chains, assurance is essential to bridge the trust gap. With the partnership with Assert AI, Arya.ag intends to strengthen its blockchain offerings and AI & deep tech vision for unprecedented visibility and assurance for its storage, financing, and commerce offerings.”
Assert AI has not only raised funds through industry veteran, but Arya.ag, India’s largest integrated grain commerce platform and a client of Asset AI, has also participated in this round. The agri-tech startup already offers its users real-time tracking of their Agri commodity; assuring quantity, quality, and payments.
Our initially bootstrapped start-up focused on building value for our patrons. We focused on what’s important, getting the basics right, and incessantly solving the pain points. Adding useless frivolous frills to the sales packages was never our thing. That’s what got us where we are today.
Our very culture of focusing on solving business challenges is now fueled by this fund raise. It now places us on the top among all AI Vision companies in the region. We were, we are, and will always be ready to deliver the best automation solutions with high accuracy.
We thank you, our clients and patrons for being with us through this. We could not have gotten here without you. We promise that you’ll continue to see Assert AI get better with every new release and update.
