Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Yamin Durrani, CEO of Kami Vision (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The bulk of your revenue right now comes from the home security segment.

Yamin Durrani: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: Based on where you sit, where do you see open problems where new entrepreneurs could come in and build new businesses? Where would you point and steer new entrepreneurs towards?

Yamin Durrani: There’s a lot of innovation happening in computer vision. In specific use cases, a small team of four or five engineers can build decent-sized companies.

Sramana Mitra: You are looking to work with other entrepreneurs who want to build on top of your platform.

Yamin Durrani: Absolutely. We have enabled three or four companies that have used our video platform. What most people end up doing is, they try to make the entire solution by themselves. That is where the expensive part comes into play. If they build that IT, we have the stack and deployment. If they can address some of these long-tail needs and some of the more challenging problems in the AI services market, we can partner with them. There is definitely market value in that space.

Sramana Mitra: Are you doing everything proactively to recruit startups like this to build on top of your platform? Are you following a SaaS strategy?

Yamin Durrani: That is our long-term vision. We want to build in enough verticals and enough deployments in other areas. Once we have those deployments, then we can add a layer where we can have this ecosystem development wherein we provide PaaS, handholding, and some funding. We have that vision. That was how the whole company was initially conceptualized. Practical things came into play.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very involved process to do a SaaS strategy. It requires systematic work to recruit those startups and support them.

Yamin Durrani: Absolutely. We have partnered with some of the students and professors in different universities. We have planted the seeds as a strategic chip partner and we have provided the stack for some of these Ph.D. students. One of the companies is doing strawberry defect detection. They need that whole end-to-end cycle to collect data and analyze data. We have SDKs and APIs. They can just focus on their thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Very nice. I really enjoyed listening to you. It looks like you have a sizable company at this point.

Yamin Durrani: We have over 200 employees.

Sramana Mitra: Are they all in the US?

Yamin Durrani: We have over 80 employees in China, 40 in the US, 40 in India, and 40 in the Philippines. We have customer service in the Philippines, R&D in India and China, and sales and marketing in the US.

Sramana Mitra: You’re based in the Bay Area?

Yamin Durrani: That is right. The headquarters is in San Jose.

Sramana Mitra: We are very interested in PaaS by the way. My belief is that a lot of these small startups should be bootstrapping by piggybacking on another stack. PaaS is an important component of that happening. We are in 2022. This is not the beginning of AI. People should already be taking advantage of things that have been built, and then bootstrapping by piggybacking on other marketplaces. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Yamin Durrani, CEO of Kami Vision
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