In the last few years, data science has made great strides especially with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Smart Apps, IoT, Digital Twins etc., backed by the trend shift in computing and hardware capabilities. Moreover, the advancements of Deep Learning and Machine Learning algorithms have fueled the problem solving capabilities related to data science. By 2019, it is predicted that the contemporary business world will witness serverless-cloud adoption because of increased number of smart applications and elevated amount of data generated by IoT. To add more fuel to the fire, another recent trend that is influencing and simplifying the lives of individuals in day-to-day tasks such as shopping, buying, and living, is Smart apps and services which are driving home automation, industrial automation, working robots, digital assistants, and voice enabled devices etc. With data science at the core of things, society and individuals are evolving into an interwoven physical and digital world where their routine chores and activities are becoming data-oriented and intelligent.
Incepted in the late 2017, SeekNShop.IO is a prominent technology company that leverages AI and natural language processing to bring the power of human understanding to e-commerce and enterprise search. Its target customers include top-tier e-commerce, automotive and enterprise companies spread across US, UK, IN, UAE, APAC, and MENA, who are interested in taking search to the next level. Led by the passionate and influential Founder & CEO Sarath SSVS, SeekNShop.IO comprises of a team of ex-Microsoft and ex-Amazon employees, instilling strong core values such as customer obsession, invention and simplification, priority to high standards, bias for action, diving deep, being open and respectful, and being self-critical and accountable in its organizational workflow.
Identifying Existing Gaps and Building Intelligent Solutions
The motivation behind incepting SeekNShop.IO began when its team of Co-founders were working with Amazon and several other e-commerce companies, realized that discovery and decision making are the biggest problems when it comes to shopping, be it e-commerce, online travel, real-estate, automotive or even banking, insurance services or stocks. For end-consumers, the discovery and decision making activities take a lot of time, is very difficult as well as a frustrating process to go through, due to the number of clicks, page refreshes and information to go through. In the end, this causes shoppers to leave the website half way through, making the seller lose on conversion, average order value, besides capital spent in getting the user to the website in the first place.
This was a major loophole where Sarath and his team started by solving the problem of discovery first, where they wanted to provide the ability for users to search digitally the same way they explain their buying need in a store to a human. To solve this problem of decision-making, the tech team of SeekNShop.IO resorted to the exact scenario that happens in the real world at a physical store. In the physical store, the conversions are quite high as compared to online shopping. Apart from the physical interaction with the product and instant delivery, the store salesperson plays a major role in increasing the conversions by engaging the customers in friendly conversations, providing them with a guided product discovery by understanding customer requirements, offering suggestions/recommendations when they are confused, and also provides a real-time discount to instigate them to complete the purchase. In addition to this, the sales representative constantly learns from customer conversations about the products he/she sells. However, this becomes impossible to replicate in digital channels as it is cost-intensive, neither have the ROI nor can a human salesperson model be extended across millions of products and users. This seemed like a very challenging and interesting problem to solve, which was not only restricted for e-commerce, but also stood true about online travel, real estate, banking/insurance, finance, automotive etc. Coming from an AI/ML background, the founding team decided to establish SeekNShop.IO with the vision to solve a common problem that modern day individuals face with discovery and decision-making in the digital world.
Redefining Shopping Verticals by Leveraging the Power of AI
To provide users with the capability of searching the way they explain in a physical store, the tech experts of SeekNShop came up with a Natural Language Search / Voice Search API (DeepSeek) which is available via chat / text / voice and is pluggable into any interfaces seamlessly with less than 2 days of integration. Furthermore, the promising e-commerce solutions provider company’s commitments to customers are to offer more than 98% Search Relevance/accuracy, 30% improvement in conversions for Specific searches, and 80% reduction in ‘NO’ result or ‘Bad’ result pages. This API is domain-agnostic and is applicable to any domain with customers spanning across e-commerce, car dealers/aggregators, finance, banking/insurance, fantasy gaming, car accessories, electrical and manufacturing parts, and online travel.
SeekNShop.IO’s product has won several awards, which includes SuperStartup Asia award, HYSEA award for Top 10 Hottest Startups from the Vice President of India, Top 25 Hottest AI companies in APAC, Top 20 AI Providers in APAC, and IET Innovation Award Final 5 Nominees being the more prominent ones. The passionate entrepreneur and his team are also filing six US patents for this product. Its award-winning API product also provides the capabilities of auto suggest, search merchandizing, personalized search, and has self-learning mechanism to improve accuracy and ranking. During the process of building this product, Sarath and his skilled team had also built an Analytics Engine that can provide Inventory Intelligence giving detailed insights on user preferences and customer inventory.
Another remarkable product, Seeker from SeekNShop.IO’s solutions portfolio is a Cognitive Agent that works exactly like a real-world salesperson is currently in the Beta phase and will be filing for 18 patents in the US.
Leader with a Passion for Technology and Entrepreneurship
Being the driving force and visionary behind SeekNShop.IO, Sarath explains, “As the CEO & Founder of a bootstrapped startup, you practically own everything from Sales to Legal, Product to Deployment and hence there should not be any specific preferences during the early phase in the journey. There is no clear demarcation of role and responsibility as well. However, currently I lead Product Management, Data Science, Sales (US for automotive), Patents, and Accounting related aspects. I have been a Product Management professional mostly in Data Science and Machine Learning areas for past 12 years and that is what comes to me naturally. However, currently I am doing a lot of client engagement and Sales where I am undergoing a huge learning curve, but also enjoying it along with its challenges.”
Gaining a Competitive Edge in the Tech World
SeekNShop.IO is one of the very few Voice Search and Natural Language Search as a Service companies in the market that can commit for more than 98% accuracy and capable of handling any number of product attributes/specs/descriptions/unstructured text etc. Additionally, its product algorithm is constantly being updated on the conversations front with users, thereby deriving insights not only for the users, but also for the algorithm to self-learn and improve. This ensures no drop in SeekNShop’s product accuracy and provides a consistently performing, and scalable engine.
Till date, the leading e-commerce solution provider company’s other product Seeker – The Cognitive Agent has not been produced by any direct competitor in the space. Sarath and his team are, therefore envisioning it to be the next big thing in the digital shopping space for decision-making. Additionally, SeekNShop’s IP in terms of patents gives the company an extra major competitive edge in the tech world.
Eyes on Global Expansion and New Vertical Offerings
Since inception, SeekNShop.IO started its foray by expanding into e-commerce verticals as a search and AI service provider, focusing on APAC and UAE markets, with e-commerce as the main segment for its operations. However, the dynamic CEO and his team have recently started endeavoring into US, UK, Australia and Canada as their focus markets for the next few years, with eyes on automotive, online travel, and finance sectors as their focus verticals apart from e-commerce. The skilled team also wants to keep expanding both horizontally and vertically in their area of operations and continue to build more data science / AI based products for these verticals in the areas of discovery, personalization and decision-making.
