SaaS startup ‘KlearStack’ Inculcates AI in daily operations

Ashutosh Saitwal CEO, KlearStack tells us more about his startup. 

How do you think is the sector going to upsurge in the near future?

I would like to talk about 3 major parts of the IT industry – Hardware, software products & services and IT Enabled Services.

 Hardware saw a surge immediately after the lockdown was announced. People rushed for buying and renting laptops, accessories, modems etc. Before the lockdown, a laptop that was available on rent for Rs. 1,500 per month, after lockdown was not available for even Rs. 6,000 per month. I believe the same temporary surge will take place when lockdown eases. Many companies will start adopting remote work/ work from home. In order to support the new operations model, there will be a temporary surge in hardware that supports work from home.

 For software products & services sector, I believe the opportunity will be huge. Probably comparable to or even larger than Y2K, since organizations will be a huge push towards low-touch operations. Automation and digital transformation will be the key agenda, as they form a central theme for low-touch. Which country other than India do you think is better suited to cater to the serious and consistent uptick in software talent?

 IT-enabled services industry is in serious trouble already and that will continue beyond lockdown as well. Of these, the majority of the low tech and low skill jobs will see a reverse trend towards in-sourcing. This will happen due to two major reasons – firstly, our BPO industry will be less competitive given increased operating costs due to social distancing and serious risk of reduction in quality due to need for much higher quality control as these low-skilled employees deliver work from home/remote locations. Secondly, most of the countries will try to protect local jobs by in-sourcing low-hanging fruits – mostly low skill ITES jobs. 

 While I have talked about generic expected trends for these sectors, it does not mean every company belonging to these sectors will experience those. When we start digging deeper, it will be important to understand which clientele each organization serves. E.g. If you are serving the travel and leisure industry, then even if you belong to the software products & services sector, you might not see a huge surge in demand for the foreseeable future.

What is the exclusiveness of your startup, that’s unique from other gigantic players in the market?

 Ours is a global award-winning, AI/ML products and services company. We have recently launched our award-winning product KlearStack. 

 KlearStack is an Intelligent Document Processing solution that provides actionable insights from free-form semi structured and unstructured documents, using our proprietary template-less Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning technology. With our product KlearStack, we help organizations make their unstructured data a competitive advantage by unlocking the insights from it.

The industry challenge that KlearStack addresses is the daunting challenge of unstructured data. 80% of the data in any organization is of unstructured nature. And documents form a major part of this unstructured data. Due to this, organizations face 2 major challenges – 1) Finding actionable insight from their unstructured documents 2) Automation of processes that deal with unstructured documents.

Based on our assessment as well as various industry reports, we estimate the market size to be $100 to 150 Billion per annum.

What is the latest mode of technology that you are catering to?

KlearStack is a modern SaaS-based (cloud) solution that uses our proprietary Artificial Intelligence technology at its heart. We have developed the cutting edge technology that leverages computer vision, natural language processing, rich text analytics and proprietary AI algorithms in order to find meaning from unstructured documents. 

How important do you think is it for people to rely on technology? Are there any major follies per se?

It is very important and perhaps inevitable to continue to see increasing adoption of technology. The disruptive events like COVID-19 only underline the vital role technology should play in future. At the same time, I strongly believe that anything uncontrolled can cause unprecedented and long lasting damage. Hence I think we should go with Augmented Intelligence mind-set as we welcome the world of Artificial Intelligence.

What are your immediate and longterm milestones like?

 Our immediate priority is to ensure all our colleagues are safe and continue to feel empowered & motivated in these difficult times. Our next priority is to continue to deliver high quality and competitive solutions that solve major pains for our clients, thereby making them super successful. In the long term, we would really like to be known as one of the best organizations with deep expertise in solving complex business challenges involving unstructured documents. 

 Lastly, any word of advice for the wannapreneurs?

 I would like to say 3 things from my own experience – firstly, it is very important that you have high risk taking abilities. That would be possible only if you have taken care of all your major personal financial risks beforehand and more importantly you have strong mental support from your dear ones. Entrepreneurship is a long and often very hard journey. You need to prepare for a marathon. And that is only possible if your personal financial obligations are not pulling you down and you are surrounded by people who provide you with the right encouragement and advice. 

 Focus on how you can add value to others. While your identification of the need and your idea are very important, remember that “action” or “relentless execution” is far more important. Your idea might change several times, you might pivot to solving different needs than what you started off to solve. However only your ability to “relentless execution” and resilience will eventually see you through. 

The last but not the least, never ever lose sight of how important it is to gather the right team. Do not compromise in finding the right people with an attitude of taking ownership coupled with effective handling of ambiguity. Often a startup founder cannot afford to hand-hold every colleague while the founder himself is grinding it out and wearing multiple hats. The startups are also trying to define several ambiguous things right from the market need, their solution, key differentiators as compared to competitors, technology stack to internal processes and team work. It is important to hire team members who have the stomach to handle such ambiguity and ability to define a beautiful organization our of all the chaos.