The momentum in the AI space is accelerating as both startups & large companies are getting into a flurry of deals to expand their AI presence.
In the past two years, Swiggy, the Naspers, DST Global and Bessemer Ventures-funded restaurant aggregator, has been on a tear. The number of interactions on its platform since October 2017 has gone from 2 billion (across consumers, riders and restaurants) to 40 billion in January 2019. In that time, Swiggy has gone from a business working with 12,000 restaurants to over 55,000; from seven cities to 70; from delivery staff of 15,000 to 120,000. The Bengaluru-based venture has become far more valuable, too — from $700 million in February 2018 to $3.3 billion by the end of the year. This dizzying growth has meant that Swiggy, a firm founded as recently as 2014, has to look beyond human intervention to keep pace. Swiggy is leaning on technology, specifically artificial intelligence (AI), to help its systems keep pace with this rapid growth. “AI is critical for us to sustain our growth,” says Dale Vaz, who heads engineering and data science at Swiggy. Over the past 12 to 18 months, Swiggy has been expanding this team, putting more resources behind it. The firm has also intensified its focus on building a strong data repository, thanks to the explosive growth of interactions, to catalyse the adoption of AI. A lot of the necessary back-end work in tagging and classification is increasingly done by code that improves itself over time. The company can today use machine learning to train its systems to distinguish between vegetarian and meat dishes from images, and also to vastly expand the languages, colloquialisms, words and strings customers could use to obtain accurate results. For instance, the words ‘chicken’, ‘murgi’, ‘murghi’, ‘koli’, ‘kolzhi’ will all be recognised by the app as a craving for poultry. Swiggy offers users different app interfaces, depending on their individual preferences. The new AI-enabled features will add more meat to its offerings, so to speak. In February 2019, the firm acqui-hired (when you buy a company for the skills of its founders or the team) Kint.io, a developer of image recognition solutions, for an undisclosed amount. “We continue to scout for deals to strengthen our presence in this field,” says Vaz. For a company like Swiggy, winning a competitive tech advantage with AI is a high-stakes necessity. It is in a heated duel for market share with arch-rival Zomato, but sees Uber Eats, Food Panda and even Dunzo as looming rivals. In India, Swiggy is hardly the first techstar to bite the AI apple. Previously, Google, Walmart Labs, Flipkart, Paytm, Oyo and several other global and homegrown players have all invested in and acquired companies to boost their presence in AI. For much of the past few years, startups and large companies have been running relatively small experiments with AI. Now the momentum in the space is accelerating, as evidenced by a flurry of deals as well as by in-house budgets at unicorns being diverted in this direction. Like all technology hype cycles, there’s a lot of posturing. AI votaries are pushing CEOs to invest in it, but the challenge is to make sure these investments generate good returns and not get lost in bureaucracy, especially when integrating an acquihired company. “AI is past this hype circle,” says Sasha Mirchandani, founder of Kae Capital, an early-stage investor in tech startups. “Now larger contracts are being offered and old economy giants are committing themselves to this emerging field.” AI refers to the ability of a computer or system to interpret external data and take decisions based on this information.
