AI-Based Analytics Platform SenseHawk Raises $2 Mn From SAIF Partners, Others

San Francisco, Mumbai and Bengaluru-based cloud-based enterprise platform SenseHawk has raised $2 Mn in Series A funding from SAIF Partners and other angel investors.

The company plans to use the funding for business development and engineering. Expansion of business outside of India, US and Australia will be a key focus in addition to the strengthening of existing contracts.

SenseHawk: Productivity For Energy And Infrastructure Industries

Founded in 2016 by Rahul Sankhe and Swarup Mavanoor, SenseHawk enables owners, managers and developers of solar assets to gain new insights about their plants that enable maximisation of returns.

The initial focus of the company is on the rapidly growing Solar Industry with future expansion to other similar sectors.

Its solutions combine different kinds of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), sensors, data processing and planning chains to create decision-making tools that drive productivity in the energy and infrastructure industries.

Swarup Mavanoor, Co-founder and CEO, SenseHawk said, “We are happy to have gained valuable support from SAIF as it adds a lot of credibility to our business model.”

The goal of the company is to digitise infrastructure asset industries through the creation of a scalable AI driven platform that combines new age sensor data and expert knowledge to deliver insights to users across functions.

Mayank Khanduja, Principal, SAIF Partners said, “We are impressed at the upside that Sensehawk solution brings to the multi-billion dollars Solar industry today and will soon do the same for other industries. As the solar industry attracts more investment, we believe that Swarup, Rahul and their team will be at the forefront of building an intelligent analytics platform that allows asset owners to maximize asset performance, and we feel excited to work with them on this next phase of growth.”

The company has a 20 member team with operations in India, US and Australia and more than 20 leading corporates as their customers.

The platform has three different components:

• SenseHawk’s ‘Link’ app controls drone flight to enable autonomous operation of the drones for data collection in a pre-programmed pattern required for an application
• The second key element of the solution is the Artificial Intelligence Engine (HawkAI) that sees and identifies the hidden patterns in the data very effectively
• The platform also provides a web-based interface, Unity, that makes it easy for enterprises to seamlessly collect, analyse and generate insights that are important for decision making

 Artificial Intelligence: Co-Creating Solutions

During the 12th India Digital Summit, Niti Aayog Chief Amitabh Kant had said, “This is a period of huge technology disruption in India. Artificial Intelligence alone will generate the opportunity to the tune of $32 Bn.”

Even as the Indian government identifies the growing potential of new age technologies, it allocated over $480 Mn under the government’s Digital India initiative in Union Budget 2018.

There are startups like Niki.AI, Arya.ai,Retention.ai, and Activ.AI, among others, specialising in the field of artificial intelligence.

In a recent study by Accenture, it was revealed that AI could add $957 Bn to the Indian economy or increase the country’s income by 15% by 2035.

Government think-tank Niti Ayog is also planning to adopt artificial intelligence in the sectors of healthcare, agriculture, education, infrastructure, and transportation. A two-tier structure has been proposed for the same which will include the Centre of Research Excellence (CORE) and International Centres of Transformational AI (ICTAI).

With emerging startups in the AI sector, the global AI sector is poised to grow to $16.06 Bn by 2022.

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