E42 Raises $5.4 Mn To Help Businesses Automate People-Centric Tasks

Natural Language Processing AI-workforce startup Light Information Systems has raised $5.4 Mn in a Series A round led by Pavestone ventures. The startup’s no-code AI platform E42 allows companies to automate otherwise complex processes, time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Light Information Systems’ enterprise clients can create and customise “AI Co-workers” to handle a wide variety of functions ranging from customer service and human resources to business analytics and intelligence gathering.

The startup’s clients include businesses across verticals and sizes, from SMEs to Fortune 500 companies.

Founded in 2012 by Animesh Samuel and Sanjeev Menon, the Pune-based startup helps clients automate people-centric tasks leveraging the human-like cognition and natural language processing of E42 that took over 150 person -years of R&D to develop. 

The startup currently employs about 40, out of which 35 are engineers. E42 plans on doubling that number to 80 by the end of the year as it uses the funds raised to scale up growth and adoption. 

Speaking about the platform’s versatility and the use cases, CEO Animesh Samuel said, “We are a horizontal no-code platform.” “Our partners and end customers can customise our product using their subject matter expertise,” he added.

“For example, our clients in the pharmaceutical industry keep track of any kinds of negative reports on any of their molecules, for pharmacovigilance using our platform,” Samuel further explained during the interview.

During the first four years of the startup, it launched “Pooch”, an SMS-based answering agent that automatically processed and answered questions. But this wasn’t them just testing the system: this was a cost-effective solution to crowdfund user-generated content that can be used to train the platform’s algorithm. 

“We didn’t have money like large companies do, to hire engineers to sit and write ‘Water is Wet’, so this is the solution that we came up with,” remarked Samuel when speaking to Inc42 about the initial stage of the startup.  

E42’s closest competitors include Google’s Dialogflow — a natural language ‘understanding’ platform that can be integrated into various user interfaces, and IBM’s Watson – a natural language question-answering system. The Indian Artificial Intelligence market is expected to reach $7.8 Bn in 2025, growing at a CAGR of 20.2%.

According to the world economic forum, the proliferation of artificial intelligence will create more jobs than it will displace. For the 85 Mn jobs like data entry clerks, administrative and executive securities etc. that will be lost — close to 97 Mn jobs like Data Analysts, AI and ML specialists will be created.