VPhrase provides insights from data; plans to get into US market

Startup Showcase

It’s a humongous task for companies to go through enormous data, and interpret them. What if there is some software that explains the insights of data in words? When Neerav Parekh, who was running a digital marketing agency, found that his clients wanted account managers to visit them and personally explain the campaign performance, as charts and data are difficult to understand, did he realise the need for automation.

“I started wondering what changes do I need to make to the report that I send to clients to ensure anyone reading it is able to understand it. What is it that my account managers do which solves this problem of understanding? When account managers interpret those charts and explain the insights, clients will be able to understand them better,” Parekh says.

When he was thinking of how could he automate this process of interpretation of data and communication of insights in language, the idea of VPhrase was born. While thinking about the product — Artificial intelligence software — Parekh was able to understand the enormous potential of it.

“This applies not just in digital marketing but also in every other place where data is being presented, as every company has to send reports to its employees and to its customers,” says the CEO of VPhrase.

The startup’s patent pending platform is Phrazor, which takes out the dry numbers and delivers simple words that communicate the hidden insights. “Phrazor is the name of our language generation platform. It analyses data, derives insights and then communicates those insights, in words and in multiple languages. It embodies the expertise of the best people in your team and automates it. Phrazor writes reports which not only tell you what happened, but also convey why did it happen and what needs to be done,” explains Parekh.

Phrazor is capable of writing reports in any language, and the startup is adding language libraries only for those languages that the clients require. “Phrazor is already writing in English, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil,” he says.

VPhrase is working with large enterprises in India such as Accenture, HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Motilal Oswal Securities, and ITC, among others. It is also working with Sun Life Financial in Canada and Shiseido in US. “At present, our team size is 25, and we are hiring more,” he says. When asked about competitors, Parekh says, “We are the only company in the Natural Language Generation (NLG) space in India. Globally, there are four to five companies in similar space. NLG is a fairly new domain and we are doing some pioneering work in the space.”

He adds, “We are revenue positive at this stage. However, we intend to get into the US market and we need funds to support that. We are currently looking at raising $ 1 million in seed funding.”

Talking about the future of AI, Parekh says, AI has been there for decades but it was always restricted to labs. “When people used to talk about AI, they used to start picturing malicious robots trying to rule humans. It's only now that people have started coming out of that phobia and have started building small but practical use cases around AI,” he concludes.