Staqu aims to redefine search through AI, eyes more domains

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup Staqu is planning to launch an AI feature soon with an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) partner. Only recently, it partnered with Karbonn mobiles to launch a series of smartphones called FashionEye.

“We are now in the process of bringing another revolutionary AI feature soon,” Staqu co-founder and CEO Atul Rai said.

Staqu was founded in 2015 by four like-minded people to solve real-world problems using machine intelligence. “We are building an automated image understanding technology that could cater automation utilising the image-related big data, since 70% of content on internet is images. Though we have started with solving the problems of fashion ecommerce, soon we are planning to expand to other domains as well,” Rai said.

The startup, which helps in innovative image-to-image matching system-simplifying image search, automated meta-tag generation and real-time recommendation, has acquired nine clients both in the OEM and ecommerce space.

When asked about the future of AI, Rai said, “Every large firm in the world is trying to bring AI into their products. Amazon did this, back in 2010, through its recommendation engine which helped it see 29% increase in sales. Indian ecommerce companies are slowly adopting AI in various aspects of their businesses to reduce costs and drive sales.”

“Take operations and cataloguing as an example. It is one of the most cash-extensive aspects of the business after deals and discounts. AI can reduce these costs just to a fraction through automation. This automation is what will drive the future, and it is high time that every ecommerce company in India opens up to it,” he added.

FashionEye helps users search and discover fashion by taking the image of a product, and using it to search across a multitude of products in a catalogue. “We have seen a very positive response with almost 85% of users returning to our platform to discover and buy products. This not only strengthens our premise of AI making huge strides towards easing the pain-point of users, but also helps convey the message that users have technically come of age to accommodate such features in their daily lives,” he said.

“Apart from ecommerce, one can apply this solution to a variety of domains such as medical imaging, image augmentation, financial analysis and authentication, user behavioural analytics, and so on,” he added.

Staqu has over two lakh images of fashion apparel in its database, and has served over 2,000 image queries from customers since its launch. It recently raised investment from Indian Angel Network.