Footfall counting or counting the number of customers visiting the store is crucial for retail stores. From performance of a promotional strategy, to staff efficiency and calculating sales conversion rate, many insights can be gained from the footfall data, and this is the reason why retail shops has been doing footfall counting over the years. While the ancient system of counting store visitors included manual counting and counting through a manual clicker, newer techniques include infrared counters, thermal cameras, WiFi analytics etc. Now with the entry of AI, footfall counting has become even more simple and insightful. Gurgaon based startup Veda Labs is harnessing AI to help retail businesses get more and real-time insights out of their footfall data, thus empowering the retails store owners and managers to take better decisions for crowd management, staff management, for enhancing customer experience and more. We interviewed Veda Labs co-founder Veer Mishra, to get more details about the startup.
Veda Labs Highlights
| Startup Name | Veda Labs |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Gurgaon |
| Sector | Artificial Intelligence |
| Founder | Veer Mishra, Vivek Singh, Saurabh Shandilya & Saurabh Yadav |
| Founded | 2018 |
| Parent Organization | Macherlabs Private Limited |
| Website | www.vedalabs.in |
About Veda Labs
Veda Labs - Founders
The Idea Behind Starting Veda Labs
Veda Labs - Name & Logo
Veda Labs - Business Model
Veda Labs - Funding
Veda Labs - Marketing Strategies
Veda Labs - Challenges
Veda Labs - Advisors & Mentors
Veda Labs - Awards & Recognitions
Veda Labs - Growth & Future Plans
About Veda Labs
Veda Labs is a super easy platform to adapt. All it needs is the existing CCTV camera. Once the solution is installed, it automatically connects to the cameras and performs all sorts of analytics like total footfall, age & gender of each walking in customer, along with repeat customer count & in-store consumer journey.Veda Labs uses computer vision and machine learning to offer deep and real time insights that retail businesses can use to enhance their operations.
Not just retail stores, Veda Labs' solutions can also be used in supermarket, restaurant, shopping mall, airport or any other real estate to gets analytical data on the visitors. CCTV footage being important for accurate analysis, Veda Labs also sends real time alerts if someone tampers with the CCTV infrastructure.
Covid - 19 has brought with it new norms that needs to be followed at retail spaces or any other spaces where public gathers. To make it easier for businesses to ensure safety of their customers and staff, Veda Labs has now also come up with a Covid - 19 AI kit, that allows to keep a real-time check on parameters like social distancing, mask detection, fever screening, space occupancy and sanitization alerts.
Veda Labs - Founders
Vivek Singh, Veer Mishra, Saurabh Shandilya and Saurabh Yadav are the founders of Veda Labs. The founders met at a coworking center in New Delhi & quickly bonded over the common interest in Ai and machine learning. Their passion to invent solutions using AI later lead to founding of Veda Labs in 2018.
Vivek Sing is CEO of Veda Labs. Vivek held technical and managerial positions at companies like Confetti India Pvt Ltd ( a paper machine equipment manufacturing company), Industrial automation company 'Rockwell Automation' and Singapore based trading company 'Trafigura'. Vivek also founded a automobile care and servicing startup 'Torque - HP', which he exited in 2016. Another Ai based startup founded by Vivek Sing is Corseco Technologies. Vivek is a BE in Electronics from Nagpur University and did MBA from Symbiosis Centre For Management and Human Resource Development, Pune.
Veer Mishra is the CMO of Veda Labs. A serial entrepreneur, Veer Mishra has over 11 years of experience across startups. Veer holds a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Electronics and Electronic Engineering. As the Chief Marketing Officer, Veer aims to create a strong brand recall through delivering the right set of campaigns to reach the relevant audiences at Veda Labs. With a deep knowledge in building and scaling AI products in the past, he works closely with the product development team as well as the sales team. Through the role at Veda Labs, Veer heads Strategic partnerships and has been focusing a lot on exploring international exposure and partnerships. Veer has multiple fields of interests, from hosting TV shows (A unique podcast talking about all the crazy aspects of startups which feature industry leaders), designing graphics and at times even ideating about space technologies. Veer has also had the experience of being a TedX speaker at XIE, Mumbai in March 2019. The topic highlighted was Raising the capital to build the best in Tech and AI for a startup.
Veer Mishra is into film making too, as he started his professional journey as a filmmaker with his venture oasIs Production. Heading the operations for his venture mYwindow, under Veers leadership the gross sales grew from $0 to $150K in just 4 months. The venture moved from being bootstrapped to being cash rich. He also began Neuron, an Artificial Intelligence platform which uses Machine Learning as a core tech wherein he was responsible for leading the entire design team and Business Development. At Project Guerrilla, he helped Portfolio startups with strategies in Digital Growth. Suggesting technology hacks and helping them understand the user psychology.
Veda Labs CTO Saurabh Shandilya is a B.Tech in Electrical, Electronics and Communication. He started his career with ATRIM Electronics Private Limited, an Electrical and Electronic products manufacturing company as an Embedded Engineer. He also worked as a Research Scholar in Carnegie Mellon University where he researched on how to use Electronics for efficient solar power utilization. Saurabh worked as Senior System Engineer with Aviation & Aerospace company, Omnipresent Robot Tech, and later founded IoTfy, a company that provided enterprise IoT solutions for consumer durable in 2015. Saurabh exited IoTfy in 2017, to join Veda Labs as a co-founder.
Saurabh Yadav is the Head of AI at Veda Labs. He is a BTech in Electronics and Communication, and started his career as an Intern in Bharat Electronics. From 2013-2016, Saurabh worked with technology company Qualcomm. Saurabh Yadav also worked with Omnipresent Robot Tech as a Senior System Engineer before joining Veda Labs.
The Idea Behind Starting Veda Labs
In late October 2017 all the founders were sipping coffee in a co-working space in Delhi, and having an intense talk on the possibilities of AI & ML, when they stumbled upon the idea to to use AI to analyze the real time CCTV footage. They realized that this idea holds great potential, and so Veda Labs was started to put this idea into practice.
"With all our research and past experience in the field of AI, we were aware of the state of the AI on edge & realized that if we can create a EDGE platform that works on existing CCTV cameras, we will be able to have a huge breakthrough in making everyday CCTV cameras smart." quotes Veer
In the early days, the Veda Labs team worked with a few retailers very closely & tested their solutions over 100s of CCTV cameras for over 100,000 hours of videos. Based on the feedback received from all the early customers, the product was molded to develop the best viable product for retail customers.
Veda Labs - Name & Logo
The Veda Labs founders were on a business road trip to meet a potential client where we they were brainstorming on what could be the name of the startup. With deep fascination in ancient Veda scriptures, the team decided to name it Veda Labs.
The company's Logo was simply made on Photoshop, and it simply represents A to Z behavior of Veda Labs Video analytics company.
Veda Labs - Business Model
Veda Labs is a B2B Saas company which has a fixed monthly retainer every month for each store/location in which the company's analytics services are deployed.
Veda Labs - Funding
Veda Labs has raised 4 rounds of funding till date. Below are the details-
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| December 2017 | Pre-Seed | $50,000 | Mr. Manish Gupta |
| December 2018 | Seed Round | $60,000 | Alchemist accelerator |
| Auguse 2019 | Angel Round | Undisclosed | Satin Neo Dimensions |
| 2020 | Pre-Series | Undisclosed | Mr.Kumar Rangarajan, Mr. Vasu Devan, Mr. Gnani Palanikumar |
Veda Labs - Marketing Strategies
The features of the platform were launched individually and for each launch the Veda Labs team targeted potential customers and channel partners.
The company got its first few customers through word of mouth and direct sales, but now Veda Labs has an established channel for sourcing potential customers.
Veda Labs - Challenges
As a retail analytics company, it was a very evident challenge when COVID and lockdown hit the market. It was extremely essential the company to rapidly innovate and adjust to the new normal. Thus the company tweaked its existing solutions and built a COVID Safety Kit that allows retailers to monitor the real time occupancy of the store/floor, also measures the temperature of each walking consumer along with if that person is wearing a mask or not.
Veda Labs - Advisors & Mentors
- Mr. Mukesh Mowji
- Mr. Ravi Belani (Prof. Stanford & Founder of Alchemist Accelerator)
- Mr. Satvinder Singh
Veda Labs - Awards & Recognitions
- YourStory Tech30 2019
- RBL Top Startup of the year
- Analytics India Magazine TOP AI startup 2019-20
Veda Labs - Growth & Future Plans
Veda Labs has established key partnerships across the globe which has resulted in LOIs (Letter of Intent) for more than 4000 locations. The startup has a pipeline of more than $2Mn in revenue wrt the LOIs.
As for the future, the Veda Labs team envisions to build more solutions that are backed by technology to help retailers and enterprises grow their businesses with real time insights.
Author: Chayanika Goswami
Source : https://startuptalky.com/veda-labs/
Date : 2020-09-09T11:10:35.000Z