Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai (Part 1)

Prashant has built a wonderful Healthcare AI company with 1600 customers worldwide. This is extremely sophisticated navigation. Please read on to learn the nuances.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Prashant Warier: I was born in a very small town in India. I grew up there and went to school there. When I was in high school, the general trend was that you either became an engineer or a doctor. I chose the engineering path and went to IIT Delhi. Then I went on to do PhD and start multiple companies.

Sramana Mitra: You were in India all along?

Prashant Warier: I did my Bachelors in IIT Delhi and then went to the US to do a PhD. The career options are limited. Either you do a PhD or an MBA. I was good in math, so I was always interested in doing applied math. My PhD was in Operations Research. Operations Research involves a lot of optimization, probability and statistics.

My PhD was in applying the latest optimization techniques to optimize trucking networks. You have trucks moving all over the US carrying multiple shipments. Each of them has a driver. It’s a massive optimization problem. Back in the day, computing was not that easy. You had to build a lot of high-quality algorithms to optimize that. You have to figure out how to optimize. You don’t have such large amounts of compute. You can’t just throw compute at the data. You have to be very crafty. That was in the US. I did my PhD from Georgia Tech.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Prashant Warier: I was in Georgia from 2001 to 2006.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2006?

Prashant Warier: I went to work for SAP. I worked for a startup that was acquired by SAP. By the time I joined, it was SAP.

Sramana Mitra: Was it in Palo Alto?

Prashant Warier: In Phoenix. They were building a lot of demand generation algorithms, basically on retail demand for different kinds of products in retail stores across different parts of the country. Demand changes by location, pricing and season. For some items, you might offer a discount. For some items, you might increase price. It helped in optimizing the price. We started doing that for everyday retail products like hotdogs or buns.

Then we started moving to t-shirts and fashion, which is seasonal. It might be in store only for six months. After that, the style goes out. There is a seasonality there and you had to figure out how to price that and discount. After the season is done, they give it for free almost.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at SAP?

Prashant Warier: Till 2011.

Sramana Mitra: Then what happens next?

Prashant Warier: I moved back to India. When I moved back to India, I worked on a startup which was using AI to target the right ads. E-commerce was new back then. India just started e-commerce in 2009. I started working with this e-commerce company to understand what products people are looking at. Basically understanding consumer behavior from looking at these different touch points.

We were collecting data from multiple e-commerce companies. We were collecting data and creating a solid customer profile. Nobody was doing that back then. It’s very similar to what Google or Facebook does. With Google coming in, it didn’t make sense to scale that up. It was a losing battle.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai
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