Pune Startup Mantra: This personal Gyde makes your company's software easy to use

A less-talked about change in work behaviour during the "work-from-home" phase of our existence, is that of, "call IT", while using or installing an application or software. You can still call IT but the process is now a business opportunity with AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) now primed to solve your issues. Cure the "paper-clip feature in Office applications, which provides, based on most user feedback, the kind of help that is needed. Identifying this need for handholding end-users, Gyde – a Pune-based startup – has created a software assistance platform and is on a mission to democratise software guidance and reduce the go-to-market time for companies. Founded by Prasanna Vaidya and Shubham Deshmukh in January 2018, Gyde uses a set of AI-based tools for educating software application users to drive actions for better on-boarding, adoption, engagement and customer success. After completing his BE Mechanical from Mumbai University in 2006, Vaidya changed course and started working in software development. After a short stint in USA, he returned to India with good exposure to artificial Intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). His co-founder Deshmukh, is a computer engineering graduate from Pune and worked on a team led by Vaidya in the USA. The duo shared ideas and brainstormed about creating a B2C application which would be used by millions. After a lot of pivots, pilots and failed attempts, since 2015, Vaidya and Deshmukh finally realised that they both were from an engineering background and did not have the marketing nous for a B2C product. Says Deshmukh, "We had created a platform for creating chatbots at a hackathon, which we eventually won.