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From an insurance surveyor assessing a car for damage, to a solar EPC company appraising a roof, to an engineer running a robot inside a pipeline, and so on, inspection is key to almost all businesses. A Gurugram, Delhi-based start-up has brought in a solution that makes inspection a lot quicker, cheaper and easier.
The 15-month-old Aiborne Tech distinguishes itself by weaving artificial intelligence or augmented reality, or sometimes a combination of both, into inspection.
Founded by Anshul Goyal, an IIT-Guwahati alum, and Anishka Parihar, an MBA from IIM-Indore, the company has developed apps that make remote inspection possible, with better results compared to physical inspection. Goyal describes the company’s products as ‘inspection-as-a-service’.
In essence, these tools make videos more interactive and real. For example, if you are showing me a video of a new machine, I can ‘touch’ the machine, thanks to augmented reality.
Similarly, if a car is brought to a reseller for appraisal, the AI-based tool can instantly identify damages such as scratches and dents. “For this, we collected humungous amounts of data — clicked a lot of vehicles,” says Goyal. They collected about two million images for the database.
Aiborne Tech won the Maruti Suzuki Innovation Challenge calling for vehicle inspection solutions. Today, the carmaker is among the start-up’s marquee customers. The rooftop solar developer SunEdison (which is making a comeback in India) uses the tools to survey roofs for solar installations.
Pashupathy Gopalan, Co-Chairman and CEO, SunEdison, says he has worked with Aiborne Tech “to develop proprietary solutions for solar rooftop using AR” and describes the company’s speed of product development as “incredible”.
Parihar says a leading car re-seller in India is among its customers, as also one customer each in Latin America and the US.
The company’s website says it has completed over 12,000 inspections and identified over 70,000 damages with 98 per cent accuracy.
The start-up is tweaking its apps for another promising market — defect detection in oil and gas pipelines. It will offer the API (application programming interface, a software intermediary that allows two applications to interact with each other) on a subscription basis. The oil company only needs to send drones to take pictures, and “our application will do the rest”, Parihar says.
Aiborne Tech recently raised seed funding from “a syndicate of CXOs and reputed angel investors” and expects to raise more soon.
The founders say they are building the start-up to be a “multi-industry relevant inspections-as-a-service platform”. In the next few years, it will scale its offerings for newer industries and “curate an enterprise-grade API library for all inspection needs”.
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