Anant Koppar is a three decade-plus veteran of Indian IT industry. A former President of Mphasis BFL, he is a serial entrepreneur who has successfully started, scaled and sold several companies including Kshema Technologies and KTwo Technologies. He is now on a new venture — Kushagramati Analytics — which has been in stealth mode for nearly a year.
Koppar says his new venture offers data-based actionable intelligence using Artifical Intelligence and Machine Learning to clients in healthcare, logistics, retail, auto and financial services sectors. In an interview with BusinessLine, Koppar spoke about his new venture. Excerpts:
Could you talk about your new venture and why you chose analytics when in the past, you have focused more on traditional IT services like application development and maintenance?
As you know, I have held senior positions in the industry across multiple companies and in fact have started, scaled and sold a few start-ups too. I am also one of the few industry veterans who actually went on to teach in academia where, over the last few years, I set up a research lab at PES University and helped train the next generation of our engineers.
However, my entrepreneurial skills were always calling me and about a year ago, when a few old technocrat friends who are domain experts in various fields asked me to join forces to make a impact in the digital transformation happening across companies in the world, I jumped in. That is when Kushagramati was born.
If you love football, you would remember the German national football team’s unbeaten run in the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Following a 7-1 victory against Brazil in the semi-finals, Germany brought Argentina to their knees in a nail-biting final that they went on to win 1-0 in extra time. But the real hero, the 12th man during their dream run, was big data analytics.
Through a complete digital analysis, Germany recognised their average ball possession time and reduced it from 3.4 seconds to 1.1 seconds to up their game. If big data analytics can help a football team win the world cup in 2014, imagine what it can achieve now, especially with the integration of other connected technologies. As big data has become bulk data over the years, data-driven solutions are transforming businesses across the world.
However, we did not want to try and boil the ocean. Rather we wanted to focus on bespoke solutions for areas we had expertise in. AI, ML, Cloud Computing and Data Analytics should not be mere jargon and should translate into actionable intelligence for clients. Which is what Kushagramati promises and delivers.
There are a plethora of players offering analytics solutions including some very large players. How are you different from the competition?
We offer strategic consulting to identify business modernisation opportunities and formulate a strategy as well as a plan that will enable clients to adopt digitalisation. The difference between us and the competition would be in terms of speed of execution, our value proposition, and the actionable intelligence we provide. We help clients analyse various proposed digital transformation strategies and have a comparative study to choose the best suited solutions to their needs.
Ours is a customised solution depending on the requirements. We monitor and tune data analytics insights and help our clients stay ahead of their competition. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, where required, we have partnered with the likes of Microsoft, AWS (Amazon Web Services), databricks and LambdaTest to integrate and customise solutions, leveraging their existing offerings. This game is not necessarily about scale but about the value we bring to the table.
In the past, you have raised funding for your other ventures. Are you looking to raise funds now?
Currently me and some of my senior technocrat colleagues have funded the company. If required, we will look at raising funds in the future. We are about 25 domain experts now and are continuously adding people. You have to recognise that this is not the conventional low end support services but bespoke, customised solutions we offer through domain experts. So we wanted to talk only after we have put in place both our solutions and a marquee client list. I am confident of the opportunity that this segment offers us and our ability to add value to clients.
