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Neoastra: A Gamut of Human-like Capabilities for Digitally Advanced Business Ecosystem

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Prashanth Venkataswamy, Krishna Kumar, & Ganesh Banda,Co-Founders

Ganesh Banda

Co-Founder

The Artificial Intelligence startup ecosystem is thriving in India with new avenues opening up, witnessing the latest applications of AI in different fields. In recent years, the Indian startup ecosystem has seen a great upsurge. The combination of industry, government, and academia has created a conducive environment for the startups to innovate and come up with solutions that can leverage AI to improve processes in various industry segments. AI allows the software to learn automatically, which makes it possible for AI-based systems to learn from experience, adapt new inputs, and perform human-like tasks.

Neoastra is a visual intelligence company providing solutions powered by innovation in machine learning and AI and driven by the cause “connectivity for all”. Neoastra develops a wide range of creative and technical business applications for web and mobile. CIO Insider engages an exclusive interaction with Prashanth Venkataswamy and the other founding members. Prashanth is a passionate engineering professional specialized in Signal processing and Machine learning. Over 10 years of experience in image processing and computer vision. Pursuing a Ph.D. in AI and an ardent believer in the fact that AI can change the world for the benefit of mankind.

In conversation with Prashanth Venkataswamy, Krishna Kumar, & Ganesh Banda, Co-Founders, Neoastra

With its computer vision capabilities, Neoastra is capable of harnessing objective data from subjective visuals. What is the SOP in place to understand the client's pain areas and build requirement centric solutions using your capabilities?
Neoastra is committed to enabling every facet of human life with AI powered solutions. As we know, AI capabilities are vast and encompass very complex learning processes, at Neoastra, our focused sector includes digital media, smart retail & homes, automotive, and agriculture. Any AI application requires sufficient computation power in terms of device

capabilities or network bandwidth. Our clients also face such limitations when the products that they envision are constrained by such factors. At Neoastra, we eliminate such barriers and put AI in the hands of users spread across a plethora of different kinds of devices (smartphones, tablets, settop boxes, or streaming media players) by providing optimized solutions. Our SOP start from the ground level, understand the data, infrastructure, and needs of the recipient end users to provide an optimized solution that clients can leverage to make their products world-class. Behind all these processes, there is a solid mathematical framework and optimized hyper-threaded software to provide a seamless user experience backed by a strong R&D team.


Krishna Kumar, Co-Founder

Neoastra solutions can work from the smallest embedded chipset to a large supercomputer. Given the varied experience of the founders from AI research to embedded systems, we have homegrown algorithms that are unique and robust to compete with the industry giants. One of the biggest telecom company is enabling a lot of their applications across their 370 million devices powered by Neoastra’s ESPRIT AI SDK. It has also opened doors for many other futuristic applications, and we are in talks with them to drive this requirement.

What are the latest challenges that Neoastra solves for its clients? Tell us about your portfolio of solutions.
Neoastra brings the power of Video & Image Intelligence to everyone by leveraging the science of Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence to analyze and interpret videos & images, converting them into actionable data for various use cases in their everyday life. Neoastra solutions portfolio consists of neoVision (face recognition, age gender estimation, emotion recognition, gaze tracking, behavioral analytics, people tracking etc.), Image AI (Construction of story based on artifacts in the image, Video AI (in-video search and analytics) and neoLiving (AI enabled smart devices). Our flagship product offering is ESPRIT (Estimating Story Parameters using Regional Information and Transformation) SDK. We have developed a suite of AI products around

images and videos. Using deep learning, we mimic the way humans understand images & video rather than just object detection. Each digital content will convey emotions and sentiments that can be used to categorize content and trigger related events. The product finds its application as a targeted media advertisement for OTT partners or smart photo organizers for OEM providers.


Prashanth Venkataswamy, Co-Founder

Smart Retail is another AI offering of Neoastra that enables retail businesses to understand patterns and enhance decision making, based on customer behavior and improve user experience by providing personalized choices. We have piloted a study that integrates with existing shopping Mall infrastructure and takes their routine CCTV surveillance to the next level. We identify track and analyze the behavior of people.

Raise alerts in case of abnormalities, generate footfall heat map, provide shopping pattern insights for each retailer, and provide suggestions on the placement of fast-moving products to strategic positions to enhance their sales, provide a smart customer shopping experience that allows retailers to identify priority customers and many other use cases. All the smart retail features are managed by our simple yet powerful visualization dashboard that transforms all the information into informative cards and infographics.

What is the future roadmap set for Neoastra?
We are a global company with a presence in the USA, Canada, and India. We see huge opportunities ahead as companies are slowly adopting AI into their system. We have garnered a lot of interest from clients for PoC’s and pilots in the IoT platform off late. We will be integrating our in-house fabricated smart switches and AI apps into a fully functional digital smart homes and factories. Also, we are targeting IoT applications in the automotive and agriculture segment. With our continuous innovation, we would like to deploy our platform in as many segments as possible solving business-critical problems.

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