CxO of the Week: Abhijit Shanbhag, President and CEO, Graymatics

Data privacy has become one of the major concerns over the last few years as we slowly shift into an automated world. This has led to people taking initiatives to secure their data, but it does not stop there.

With overwhelming developments in technology, video analytics offers a helping hand in overhauling CCTVs in both public and private regions. It has given rise to what we now know as cognitive media.

The global cognitive media market size to reach $1,839.1 million by 2023 from $396.7 million in 2017, growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 27.2% during the forecast period, as per MarketsandMarkets report.

Increased adoption of the cognitive computing technology for various applications in the media industry and demand for automated workflows in content creation and distribution are major growth drivers for the global cognitive media market, it added.

In an exclusive interview with Abhijit Shanbhag, President and CEO, Graymatics, discusses why he opted to enter the cognitive media market and why he is a self-confessed geek.

What were your dreams and passions growing up?

I was born and raised in Mumbai. Right from my childhood, I had a penchant for technology. Growing up, I knew I wanted to make a career in the field of advanced technologies and after completing graduation from the reputed IIT-Bombay, I went to California for further studies. Even though, AI was not yet a ready-to-use technology back then, I studied it during my college years and was quick to identify it as the technology of the future.

What made you kick-start Graymatics?

After I completed my studies, I started working for Qualcomm. However, I was constantly driven by the vision that AI was going to be the technology of the future. I noticed the huge volumes of video content available on platforms such as YouTube.

I felt that the conventional search capabilities were very weak and relied on keywords in the captions instead of the actual video content to categorize it. This was when I understood the potential that video analytics could offer in the current era of CCTVs across markets, and regions. Driven by this vision, I launched Graymatics in 2012.

Why do you think that there is a need for your company to exist in today’s market?

Graymatics is a cognitive media processing company that offers a cloud/on-prem platform to enable automatic analysis and recognition of products within videos and images.

Whether it is surveillance of commercial premises, intrusion alert on the fences, monitoring traffic violations or managing crowd density, and ensuring adherence of COVID-19 appropriate behaviour.

What type of tech and algorithms do you use for your product which separates it from the usual CCTV’s?

The conventional CCTVs only passively create humongous volumes of image and video content which is unoptimized and the potential benefits of this data are not explored by the typical CCTV systems which simply store the data for a specific duration of time after which it is deleted.

Graymatics has built a comprehensive cloud platform for cognitive media processing. The company is uses AI, machine learning, IoT and data analytics to create video content aware tools.

The usage of such tech enables turning a normal CCTV system into a very massive video data in near real-time and generating information in alerts as per the need.

What pushed you towards cloud-based analytics? Would you like to explain IVAaaS platform in brief?

I am a self-confessed geek and right from childhood. I believed that the combination of AI and data analytics would emerge as the most potent technology of the future. With the cloud enabling seamless, limitless and global access, it was a natural choice for me to build analytical solutions on cloud.

IVAaaS (Integrated Video Analytics as a Service) is a transformational cloud-based Video Analytics platform from Graymatics. It can be deployed by telecommunications carriers for their enterprise clients using their cloud accounts. The solution offers highly versatile, flexible, pay-as-you-go, and easy to use Video Analytics solution as a service.

It offers custom access to different users, simple and intuitive navigation, configurable analytics at each camera level, easy monitoring and delegation of alerts as well as detailed dashboards etc.

How do you compete with other companies such as Silversparro, AllGoVision, Videonetics, Livedarshan, and Cron-J?

Graymatics has advantages which make it unique in terms of operational capabilities. We have the highest breadth of AI powered video-analytics in the industry.

The company offers optimized middleware to support the highest number of high-performance AI-based analytics within a small computer hardware footprint. This enables us to achieve the lowest TCO for high-performance AI systems.

We have built a compelling and comprehensive solution that has components such as a sophisticated alert report engine, forensic search, insightful dashboards and easy mobile app integrations.

What are the recent developments at your company?

There are developments taking place like Smart Cities across the Southern and Eastern parts of India. Another key area of development is in the transportation sector where our technology is being used at train stations for surveillance and crowd management.

Any latest round of investment?

Graymatics was initially funded by Citrix Systems and the Singapore Prime Minister’s Office. Recently, we received an investment from the smart city enabler Quantela which has a major Go-To-Market (GTM) alignment.