How a kitchen conundrum, led three techies to develop industry-winning computer vision platform used by the likes of Samsung and IFB
Summary
Today, we are powering experiences that enable consumers to engage with food in meaningful ways, says Anoop Balakrishnan, Co-founder, Agrima Infotech, a Kochi-based startup that today has two very successful products --RecipeBook, an intelligent recipe discovery platform and Psyight a dedicated computer vision platform for recognising raw, cooked and packaged food items.Serendipitously, it was their first product, RecipeBook, which began as a quest by three bachelors to make the daily grind of cooking easy, that laid the foundation for the larger vision.RecipeBooks journey began with Anoop, Arun Ravi, Nikhil Dharman, flatmates and co-founders, finding a solution to make everyday cooking easy based on the ingredients and food items that were available. So searching for recipes based on the ingredients at hand was a big issue.It was just one of those aha moments by Nikhil, who suggested to leverage a deep learning computer vision to devise a solution. In addition, features such as Snap n Cook and Shake and Make make it the most feature-rich app in the segment.With a loyal and growing user base and competitive technology stack, one area where RecipeBook has been hard at work is working on a scalable monetisation model.For RecipeBook, India will continue to be the most important market at this point, even though they have received global traction from the NRI community and a small percentage of native global users. The content uploaded to RecipeBook powers the Psyight food recognition engine.Anoop believes that Computer Vision will become the basic building block of most retail technologies in the future. In fact, after doing multiple POCs, Samsung preloaded Psyight food recognition in Bixby Vision option inside their smartphone camera.