ParallelDots, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, has won the Tech4Future Grand Challenge powered by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and Invest India. The company has received a cash prize of USD 50,000. SoftBank has also invited ParallelDots for an incubation opportunity for 2-3 months in Japan.

The Tech4Future challenge was launched in November 2018 aimed at identifying the most promising Indian startups in the domain of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, facial recognition and cyber security sectors. A total of 300 startups applied for the challenge. ParallelDots’ Chief Executive Officer, Angam Parashar attributes the company’s success to the strong research and development capabilities of ParallelDots which is constantly pushing the boundaries of its retail AI platform, Karna AI.

Karna AI provides an image recognition solution to CPGs and Retailers to track key shelf KPIs such as share of shelf (SOS), planogram compliance and out of stock (OOS).

Ankit Narayan Singh, CTO at ParallelDots, said, “This recognition is a testament to the immense effort put by our machine learning engineers to create SKU detection algorithm that needs just one sample image to train. Our research work has been published in top AI conferences like NIPS, ISBI and NAACL.”

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ParallelDots revenue has grown 5x in the last 12 months with a global clientele spread across multiple geographies including the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia and India. The company has raised $2 Mn from Multipoint Capital and hopes to break even by the end of 2019.