Oct 1, 2013

WhatsApp The life of a VC today might seem quite glamorous from the outside, especially to those in the startup space. However, a closer look would tell you that they’re probably working away just as hard. And the fact that people like us, at YourStory.in, along with many others in the industry are bringing out startups in the thousands, doesn’t make investing in them easy. In fact, investing in general, isn’t easy and it needs a lot of research. What started as a happy problem for investment firms, is now becoming a challenge – drowning in data and starving for insights. So much so, that the world annually spends about 25 billion dollars on market research services. Furthermore, a Gartner report suggests that Financial companies have shown the most interest in Big Data solutions. Bridging the gap between information and knowledge The problem statement is simple – there’s too much qualitative data available on the public domain, and sieving through all of them for insights is difficult. Mridul Gupta and two other friends, Karthik Vaidyanathan and Aditya Goel, who were professionals in the financial sector, also felt this problem, and went about building Info Assembly. Advertisement Free Download: ‘A beginner’s guide to app store optimization’ Mridul calls Info Assembly an “Intelligent Big Content platform for public data investment insights.” Mridul explained that the platform will in searching for relevant content on the web, and presents the story of the company that they’re looking for. But it doesn’t stop there – it structures the information in such a way that it’s users can derive actionable insights, with respect to investment – “It’s like Google meets Pandora, Visual.ly and Evernote.” Mridul shared how the company helps in deriving insights through various tools, like proprietary rating mechanisms for information sources, automatically generated data visualization and a seamless user experience which keeps the user interactions on the same interface. Furthermore, the product is also has collaborative features. Challenges Mridul shared that finding the right kind of talent is Info Assembly’s biggest problem as of today. He says, “We’re in the B2B business and finding the right kind of people to work with you is quite a challenge. We have really tried through all the possible channels, but none of this has provided us with the right kind of people we were looking.” It is particularly ironic because the product that they’re building aims at replacing some of the data scientists’ job. He says, “Over the years, the cost of a data scientist has been gradually increasing, while computer infrastructure has reduced exponentially. There can definitely be a tool that can replace many of the things that the data scientists does.” But when it comes to running the company itself, Mridul shared that the Info Assembly is in a good place, as they had recently won the ARK challenge accelerator contest, USA, where they were one of the three startups that won a prize money of 150,000 USD. (You can apply to Info Assembly here ) A startup selling to VCs? Info Assembly is an interesting tool which the associates at a VC firm will find great use for. Being in this space, we know that media sites like our own, are an important source of information to the venture capital fraternity. A tool that presents actionable insights from all information about a particular subject matter is quite interesting. Of course, the applications are much more, like manufacturing, CPG and even academia. But, for the group of founders, it’s always been about being able to do something of their own. On a sign-off note, Mridul did share that he and his team had a great passion towards starting up. But, like all quants and finance guys, their product (which still needs work, for which they’re hiring), means business.