Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) & IoT-focused early-stage venture fund pi Ventures announced the first close of their maiden fund at $13 million.

pi Ventures, a $30 million fund, is expected to make the final close within this year. Its Limited Partners (LPs) include SIDBI, India’s top lender for small businesses; prominent family offices from the US, Canada, Singapore and India; and leading entrepreneurs like Mohandas Pai, Binny Bansal, Deep Kalra, Sanjeev Bikchandani and Bhupen Shah, among others.

Co-founded by Manish Singhal and Umakant Soni, pi Ventures invests in early-stage startups that focus on solving problems in healthcare, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors using AI, ML and IoT. The VC fund plans to invest in 18-20 startups from this fund over the next three to four years.

Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures, said: “India is the dark horse in the AI race given it has lot of data, brilliant data science talent and early adoption environment due to broken processes and we are happy to play a part in helping India leapfrog with AI. We are thankful to our early backers, investors and founders who have chosen to work with us. We are very excited to play a role in building a strong AI based product ecosystem in India.”

pi Ventures has made three investments so far in the healthcare and energy-efficiency space, namely SigTuple, Zenatix and ten3T.

SigTuple is in the medical diagnostic space and is creating a deep learning-driven, cloud-based solution for detection of abnormalities and trends in medical data, for blood diagnosis.

Zenatix is a data-driven energy efficiency company that uses advanced machine learning based models and delivers 10-30% energy efficiency to large commercial consumers of electricity along with predictive insights to prevent downtown.

ten3T is in continuous monitoring of medical data like ECG in real time through its own smart patches to enable mobile ICU for smaller hospitals.

The VC firm was started in mid2016 by Singhal and Umakant Soni, both come with rich experience in setting up, building and scaling companies. Manish was co-founder & CEO at LetsVenture and a prominent angel investor. He has rich product experience having worked with Sling Media, Ittiam Systems, and Motorola.

Soni was Director India, Science Inc & Co-founder of one of the first AI BOT company out of India, called Vimagino

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Zenatix Solutions, an IoT- and Machine Learning-based  energy efficiency startup, has raised $1.2 million in pre-Series A round of funding. pi Ventures, an early-stage fund co-founded by seasoned investor Manish Singhal, led the round, with co-investment from existing investor Blume Ventures.

Earlier, Zenatix has received capital infusion from a group of angels, including Rahul Khanna (Trifecta Capital), Rajan Anandan (Google) and Snapdeal co-founders, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, in addition to Blume

Zenatix was co-founded by Rahul Bhalla, Vishal Bansal and Dr. Amarjeet Singh. It uses advanced machine learning based models and delivers 10 per cent to 30 per cnet energy efficiency to large commercial consumers of electricity. The models are built by collecting and analysing more than 30 million of previously unseen data points every day from electrical assets.

These models allow for automated and intelligent controls along with predictive and preventive maintenance of these assets, resulting in consistent and comfortable consumer experience in retail and banking sites while delivering high energy savings.

Zenatix aims to address the energy efficiency problem across a range of customers and eventually help grids turn smarter. Its flagship product WattMan addresses the problem for large retail chains and banking/financial set-ups. WattMan is built over a scalable Internet of Things (IoT) stack and includes robust connected hardware developed in-house by Zenatix through extensive research and development.

Given the distributed nature of retail/banking set-ups (hundreds of thousands of outlets/branches, spread across the country), having a control over the electricity spend and providing the right customer experience at the same time is a big challenge.

For example, in a Quick Service Restaurant (QSR), maintaining the right temperature in customer areas, kitchen areas and cold storages is crucial. Also, they need to make sure that all their air-conditioning, kitchen and refrigeration appliances are working optimally all the time. WattMan addresses these challenges in an automated manner through its cloud based intelligent controls driven by advanced machine learning algorithms.

WattMan has won 20 customers (large retail chains/banks) since its launch in April 2016. The company aims to continue adding more customers with additional focus on scaling up with the existing customers.

“We have a subscription based engagement model — the customer doesn’t have to pay anything upfront. It is a fixed annual fee whereby the energy efficiency benefit itself outweighs the fee. Additionally, there are multiple other benefits such as improved consumer experience and ability to automatically audit the usage of electricity. Typically, the customers become cash flow positive from 1st quarter itself,” said Rahul Bhalla, Co-founder and CEO, Zenatix.

The company is currently focused on Indian market, with a plan to expand internationally over next 6-12 months. The current round of capital will be used primarily for hiring across all its functions, viz., Technology, Product, Operations and Sales.

Speaking about the company and opportunity, Manish Singhal, Founding Partner of pi Ventures said, “Zenatix’s integrated approach of building connected hardware, with sophisticated machine learning algorithm to work on resulting dark data generated is what will set them apart. In India cost of electricity is same as in the US, despite the purchasing power parity. Thus it’s a big space with plenty of innovation & upside possibility, given the kind of data, Zenatix is starting to lay its hands on. Current use case of Wattman is a great one, which allows them to sustainably get good quality data sets, while building deep customer value. As they amass more richer data sets, we should be able to tap into predictive insights for equipment and energy usage for their customers”

Rahul further added, “One obvious solution for solving world’s electricity problem is to increase the generation capacity. However, since the demand for electricity is increasing much faster than the supply, only sustainable solution is energy efficiency. Zenatix is committed towards delivering data driven energy efficiency with the aim of building a sustainable planet. We are now at an inflection point in our journey. We worked hard in 2016 to streamline our product offering and value proposition. We now have a strong base of almost 20 customers, each of whom have a very large presence across the country. The money can now be used to expand the customer base and deliver additional value from the product in an automated fashion.”

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pi Ventures, an early-stage VC fund launched by veteran investor and serial entrepreneur Manish Singhal, is looking to invest in 12-24 startups from India from the current fund.
With a corpus of U$30 million, pi Ventures is mainly looking for opportunities in the Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and Internet of Things (IoT) sectors, Singhal said in a interview with Startagist.com.

pi Ventures has already invested in ten3T — a startup that builds wearable medical devices that collects and integrates medical grade data in real time. It has also committed to one more startup. It invests between US$100,000 and US$1 million each based on various factors.

“While there are many VC investors in the technology space, there is no specialised funds in AI, ML and IoT. Existing VCs are hesitant to invest in these areas, as they don’t understand the space. The team behind pi Ventures have founded startups in these areas and so understanding comes naturally to us,” he said.

According to him, pi Ventures is India’s first Applied Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & IoT focused fund. The VC firm focuses on healthcare, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors. It is backed by some of the leading entrepreneurs globally.
With over 24 years’ experience in building and investing in startups, Singhal has been active in the Indian startup ecosystem. He is also the co-founder of LetsVenture, one of the leading online deal-making platforms in India. He later quit LetsVenture due to the differences with other co-founders.

Before LetsVenture, he was the India head of Sling Media, a Silicon Valley-based consumer electronic startup. Singhal has invested in over a dozen startups in his personal capacity.

AI to change the landscape of India’s healthcare space

Singhal also said that AI and ML can bring drastic change to the healthcare, fintech and logistics industries in India. AI has already made its way into the consumer Internet space and it is expected to play much bigger roles in other industries.

“I think healthcare is going to greatly benefit from AI and it can democratise the healthcare access in the country,” he added. “As you already know, the doctor-patient ratio in India is very low. We can improve healthcare by building more intelligent system, so that doctors will be able to remotely monitor patients. It offloads the doctor from meeting patients in person, and thus you can save more people with fewer doctors,” he said.

He added that AI and machine learning technologies can also make the diagnostic system much easier and more automated — thus more people get access to healthcare.

“Logistics also stands to get the benefits of AI in future. As you know most logistics companies spend a huge chunk of their budget on the roads due to the inefficient infrastructure. AI-driven logistics solutions can update you about the traffic congestion and tells you what to do and what not,” he said.

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