Join us on November 9 to learn how to successfully innovate and achieve efficiency by upskilling and scaling citizen developers at the Low-Code/No-Code Summit. In 2013, after a decade in Silicon Valley, neuroscientist/designer duo Anand Chandrasekaran and Ashwini Asokan started Mad Street Den with the aim of taking computer vision technology it beyond the realm of scientific research. Today, through its Vue.ai business unit, the company helps retailers such as Diesel, Off-White and Tata CLiQ grow their businesses by reducing operational costs and increasing revenue through automation, and by creating personalized customer experiences. "Think of Vue.ai as a vertically integrated stack for the retail industry," said Asokan, who in addition to having co-founded of Mad Street Den serves as CEO of Vue.ai. "Today, a retailer has to shop across tens of vendors to avail a CDP, a recommendation system, a search engine, a styling and cross-sell solution, a marketing automation engine, A/B testing software, workflow automation -- the list is absolutely endless."

With Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sparring over its ethics and China announcing its intention to create a $150 billion domestic industry based on it, Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the most discussed topic in the tech news cycle. It's likely to be a talking point no matter what your favourite watering hole for tech news. Billions of dollars have been invested by VCs in AI since 2016 with the US and China leading the race in record funding in terms of deals and dollars. In sharp contrast, Indian startups have collectively raised less than $100 million from (2014-2017YTD), according to data from startup analytics firm Tracxn -- that's smaller than Andrew Ng's recently launched $150 million VC fund. Another way to look at it: Grammarly, a Valley-based spell check tool raised more dollars than all of India's AI startups put together in the past three and a half years.

Mad Street Den, an India-U.S. startup focused on artificial intelligence that was started by ex-Silicon Valley founders, has pulled in an undisclosed Series A round of funding from Sequoia Capital India. Existing investors Exfinity Ventures and growX Ventures also took part. The two-and-a-half-year-old company is registered in the U.S. but principally located in Chennai, India, with offices in London and San Francisco. Mad Street Den was founded by husband and wife duo Anand Chandrasekaran and Ashwani Asokan who spent more than 25 years combined working in the U.S. -- he is a neuroscientist who graduated Stanford, while she spent most of her career Stateside with Intel Labs. We wrote about Mad Street Den when it picked up a 1.5 million seed round in January 2015.

Mad Street Den, an India-US based artificial intelligence startup plans to scale up its fashion retail vertical Vue.ai after recently raising Series A funding from Sequoia India, Exfinity Ventures & growX Ventures. "For the next 12-18 months, we plan to scale Vue.ai both in terms of product offerings and new markets" Ashwini Asokan, co-founder & CEO of Mad Street Den told ETtech "Now that we've gone global and established a product market fit, it's really about scaling that global presence". Vue.ai, Mad Street Den's first vertical, offers AI-based products to help retailers improve brand loyalty and stickiness, at a time when there are fighting with product differentiation and customers jumping around different sites based on discounts. It currently offers around 14-15 products spanning across the entire consumer lifecycle on a website or an app including visual recommendations, visual search and homepage personalizations among others. "We work with brands where we are pushing as much as 40% of GMV through our visual recommendations platform" said Ashokan.

Indian artificial intelligence startups are disrupting the fashion industry by helping brands identify trends on how consumers buy clothes. Brands are crunching time to bring new designs to market using the underlying technology that help predict consumer trends, while increasing sales of their new selections. Typically, brands freeze new designs nine months to one year in advance of the respective seasons. "More than half of the branded clothes by big retailers are sold in discounts. Brands think they know their customers, yet they have not been able to clearly identify what their choice is," says Ganesh Subramanian, founder and chief executive officer of Stylumia, an artificial intelligence and computer vision startup.

CHENNAI: Ever logged onto an e-commerce website and felt confused on what to buy or where to go? To ease the process and deliver a better shopping experience, companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The startup uses AI to understand the semantics of websites along with the relations a product has with its pricing, discounts, etc and leverages those relations to find out the best deal (or coupon) available across any e-commerce site. So, how is Grabshack different from other price comparison website? Rajat explains, "We search live/real time across hundreds of ecommerce sites (like Google), while other deals and coupons sites in India manually enter deals and coupons on their site (curated list) from which they search."