Mihup, Mad Street Den among most promising AI startups globally
BENGALURU: Indian artificial intelligence (AI) startups, Bangalorebased Mihup Communications Pvt Ltd and Chennai-based Mad Street Den Systems Pvt Ltd, are among three early-stage local ventures that are on the list of some of the most low-key, yet promising startups around the world, according to a Bloomberg report.
In a report titled, “The 50 most promising startups that you’ve never heard of,” Mihup, Mad Street Den and Omapal Technologies Pvt Ltd, which operates online fashion rental venture Flyrobe, are listed among a handful of startups globally.
Other promising global startups on that list include California, US-based commercial drones start-up Airware, cloud security firm Distil, Palo Alto-based AI startup Kahuna and Silicon Valley-based Quanergy Systems, which is working on self-driving car technology and has raised $134.5 million so far from investors such as Samsung Ventures and Daimler.
The emergence of Mihup and Mad Street Den highlights how artificial intelligence startups from India are slowly starting to go mainstream and are among the hottest focus sectors for some of the world’s top venture capital firms, including Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital.
Last year, Mihup raised about ₹45 crore from investors such as Accel, while Mad Street Den also raised an undisclosed sum in a Series A round from investors led by Seqouia Capital.
According to data from startup tracker Tracxn, the number of Indian startups that are dabbling with AI and building intelligent systems, products and machines around the rapidly-emerging technology is on the rise.
Over the course of the past decade, India has produced at least 292 startups that have built products around AI, according to Tracxn.
Of these, about 68 early-stage ventures have attracted cumulative funding of $124 million across 89 rounds of funding.
Other local startups that have recently attracted the attention of the mainstream VC community include healthcare AI startup SigTuple, which received backing from Accel and Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, among others; hiring startup Belong, which has built an AI-enabled candidate sourcing platform; and IDG Ventures-backed Uniphore, which is working on speech recognition, voice biometrics and virtual assistant solutions and has raised about $6.6 million so far. A number of marquee investors, including Binny Bansal and Mohandas Pai, even invested in AI-focussed venture fund Pi Ventures.
In a December interview, Shekhar Kirani, a partner at Accel Partners India, said that AI would be one of the top focus areas for the VC firm’s fifth India fund — Accel raised $450 million as part of its fifth India fund in December.
Mihup Communications is one of the companies in which Accel has invested.
According to experts tracking the Indian startup ecosystem, areas such as natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and cognitive computing have caught the eye of investors across the board, given heavy investments that companies across sectors are making in the sector, raising the potential for big-bang exits over the next 5-10 years in the same way as the consumer internet sector did for investors over the past decade.
Companies ranging from the world’s largest technology services firm International Business Machines Corp (IBM) to new-age tech giants Google Inc, Apple Inc and Facebook Inc to automotive giant Ford Motor Co have already poured billions of dollars towards leveraging cognitive computing and artificial intelligence.
According to a recent forecast by technology researcher International Data Corp, global revenues from cognitive systems and artificial intelligence is estimated to cross $47 billion by 2020.