Interview With Toronto Based Startup, AiHello

-

Elevate is looking to feature Canada’s most promising AI startups on stage at this year’s festival through our ElevateR Pitch. ElevateR Pitch is a March Madness-style pitch competition where Canada’s best AI startup companies compete for the attention of international media, investors and global tech leaders. Finalists from across Canada will face-off with over $1,000,000 CAD in funding up for grabs for select finalists. On Tuesday, September 25 at the Sony Centre, the final four companies will get to pitch live on Elevate Main Stage right before Al Gore’s keynote.


We interviewed Ganesh Krishan, from AiHello, an AI startup founded in 2018 and headquartered in Toronto. Read below to learn more about Ganesh’s experiences at a startup and valuable advice he gives to the next generation of startup founders.

What problem is your company solving and how?


We forecast sales of inventory by location. AiHello is a two-sided logistics company working to solve India’s shipping and supply chain problem. We connect a growing base of ecommerce merchants to a nationwide network of digitized warehouses to simplify shipping and logistics, allowing sellers to reach a large customer based quickly and easily.

 

Tell us about your lightbulb moment where you came up with the idea?


I have been in the retail industry for close to 16 years and have previously lead the retail forecasting project for IBM PC division. In 2014 I started consulting ecommerce sellers and helping them reach their business goals. One major challenge that I noticed is faced by almost all sellers is that they lack access to third party logistics and after connecting to 3pl systems they do not have enough information about stocking optimally by each warehouse. The same challenges are faced by chain retailers on a different scale. Their main challenge is stocking optimally by location

 

What was the biggest challenge in your first year?


The biggest challenge was to get quality data for our machine learning algorithms. This is indeed a challenge for most big data analytics and machine learning algorithms. This was a chicken and an egg situation because we could not deliver optimal results until we had fair bit of data to process and we could not get signups because of suboptimal results.

 

What was your turning point?


We added few more functionalities to our platform that did not require machine learning or big data. Matt, from FBA ALLSTARS, then emailed his podcast listeners about AiHello and offered then free account. We had a big success with 500+ sellers registering on our platform in a month or so.

 

What is your biggest challenge today?


Our biggest challenge today is in the business and growth area. This is a new area for the team and we are working together to solve the challenges. Tech challenges are concrete and quantifiable and hence easy for us to accomplish. Business challenges on the other hand deals with human emotions and are not really quantifiable and hence our struggle with it.

 

Best advice you’ve received?


It’s hard to rank the advice we received as best but we got numerous good advice. I usually find all advice given by Paul Graham on his site to be exceptionally good and very well written.

 

Best perk of your job?


The best perk of the job is that this is something that I really love doing. AI and Machine Learning has not only been my career but it is also my passion. The dev team is excellent and I love the daily challenges and growth from this startup

 

Your latest tech discovery?


We have been focusing on Monte Carlo Tree Search to improve our predictions. MCTS was also used by Google DeepMind in it’s AlphaZero chess engine. We have  managed to get a working prototype of AlphaZero that plays chess with reasonable strength. We are amazed with the simplicity of the algorithm.

 

Your advice to the next generation of startup founders?


It’s much more important to focus on sales and generate revenue as quickly as possible. Ship the products as soon as possible and while you are gaining traction you can refine the product further based on customer feedback.

 

What are you most looking forward to at Elevate?


I am looking forward to network with other startup founders in AI space.

Full Name: Ganesh Krishnan


Company Name: AiHello


How many employees do you have? 9

How many users do you have? 750

Popular posts from this blog

Guide to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

-
Those were the days when getting your book published was like a catch-22 situation, where the authors need to get past the most difficult gate. They spend months writing a book proposal and contacting agents in order to pitch their books up to great publishers. Who again are never satisfied with what they write and comments that it may not make good money.  So, when agents reject their book authors either abandon their dream of getting their book published or instill great confidence through contacting directly with publishers. Now publishers in turn send a rejection letter or quite a bad offer. Which is why Amazon created an incredible thing for authors as they can be a self-published author. This sounds great right!!! It actually paves the way for indie authors to bypass the traditional publishing method and be independent.  In this article we will get into the in depth knowledge of KDP like: What actually is KDP? What is KDP Select? What is CreateSpace? What is Amazon Associate? So,
Read more

E-Commerce has no borders: Myth or reality?

-
Image
One of the issues usually mentioned when talking about e-commerce is that it has served to break the frontiers. Consumers often look for specific things, products that they want, and it really gives them a little equal where the sellers sell them if what they offer them is what they want and if they make it arrive quickly and efficiently. This has created a boom in so-called cross-border trade (for example, we have to think about how we buy books today and where they come from nowadays: online bookstores sell all over the world, some of them even with free shipping no matter where you are) and has made consumers open their range of options. There are those who buy directly from Chinese e-commerces, although the products end up taking much longer to arrive than if they are bought in a geographically close online store. But is this principle absolutely true? Are consumers really so foreign to geography? I mean, are we buying without really caring about the physical location of
Read more

Kindle Direct Publishing: How to Make Real Money on Amazon.

-
Image
Kindle Direct Publishing is the all new trend going on in this competitive world. Where people are opting for KDP instead of the traditional method for their books to get published. It has indeed revolutionized the publishing method paving the way for all the writers around the world to earn through their writings.  By adding string of words together, authors get the access to publish their book in the world famous platform i.e., Amazon Kindle. But in order to make your book a big success, there are several steps to be followed. So, Today I am going to introduce you to the various steps to be keep up to before getting into the publishing method.  Make Money through Amazon KDP Making money through Amazon KDP needs real patience as it is not at all easy to become a recognised self-published author quickly. One has to ask several questions before starting their journey, like that of; In what niche/category the book comes under? What is the rate of competition ? Are there a good range of
Read more