Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Divyabh Mishra, CEO of CrowdANALYTIX (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You said that you partially sold the company at a $100 million valuation. What is the structure of the company?

Divyabh Mishra: That’s about 43% of the company. That is another interesting piece of the company. Macnica is a public Japanese company. They are distributors of semiconductor parts and are trying to diversify.

One of the reasons that they own 43% of the company is that they want to use our platform to feed an idea that they have called the Macnica common platform. This is going to leverage their relationships in Japan. They will provide the raw sensor data for different types of sensors that have been built and we would use our community to build a bunch of solutions using those sensor data and turn them into applications for different industries.

The first product that we are building is a smart building technology. In Japan, new buildings need to be certified for their quality. These sensors are being deployed across buildings. We are now collecting that data and deriving insights from that data. That is the first application.

There can be many more applications. You can apply in healthcare as well. The idea is to get the raw data from those that are already creating this information. Omron is one of the partners that have a bunch of devices that generate data. 

Sramana Mitra: Basically, you and your partner want to diversify from the retail use case to a more diverse use case and build a broader set. The core principle is using the community to build models for these different use cases. 

Divyabh Mishra: Correct. This segues into some of your other types of questions and my view on the industry. When you go to the client, one hurdle that you face is this – not only do they not have a data scientist, their data is very poor in quality as well. It’s not ready. That’s part of the reason why a lot of AI projects fail.

Success will come when you can get the entire package. This is an approach that we are seeing; whoever generates data is part of the platform. Think of it as a layered architecture where the lower layers are being taken by these audience and you build a bunch of things on top and almost create a community around it. That is the idea.

Sramana Mitra: What do you plan to do with the company as a whole? Are you going to build it as an independent company and take it public? What is the end game here?

Divyabh Mishra: Going public is the end game. I have two options. When this deal came to us, there was an option for doing an outright sale with one of our clients. I knew that would have been the end of the company.

Then these guys came along. They gave me an opportunity. I got an exit and got some money and still have an opportunity to keep playing the game. The game here now is to do an IPO, most likely in Japan or India. Even after COVID, my feeling is that the need for automation is only going to grow.

Sramana Mitra: Why in Japan or India? 

Divyabh Mishra: It all depends on how fast we grow. If it’s more around $40 – $50 million, then we will probably do it in India or Japan. If we can quickly get to $100 million, then who knows. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Divyabh Mishra, CEO of CrowdANALYTIX
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