Designing a dream startup

Ashwini Asokan is founder and chief executive officer at Mad Street Den, an AI and computer vision startup based in Chennai. Asokan returned to India from the United States after more than a decade to bootstrap Mad Street Den, which she founded with her neuroscientist husband, Anand Chandrasekaran, in 2013.

An alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, Asokan graduated with a master’s degree in interaction design. She went on to work with Intel in California, where she led a team working on improving the user experience for mobile products.

At Mad Street Den, Asokan brings together her capabilities as a product designer and a cultural researcher to create technologies that feel intuitive and natural to humans. Her company’s first product is a visual search engine called Vue.ai. Sold to e-retailers, Vue.ai allows users to search for an article by uploading its picture and also learns from their past searches to suggest things that may fit their taste. Her work, she says, sits at the intersection of technology, people and complex organisational systems.

Asokan wants to establish Mad Street Den as a computer vision company with a global footprint. The company already sells to online shopping sites in Singapore and is now developing products for other verticals, such as gaming. Asokan represents a small but growing community of women founders in India, and an even smaller group of women leading deep-technology startups.