Mad Street Den raises $1.5 million to bring artificial intelligence to ecommerce

Click a picture of somebody wearing a dress you like, and MADstack – the artificial intelligence platform of one-year-old Indian startup Mad Street Den – will find its closest match on an ecommerce site – after first seeing if the person whose picture you took is a man or a woman.

That’s just one of the magical things that MADstack can do for ecommerce, adtech, and gaming.

MADstack has also cast a spell on investors. Mad Street Den just raised US$1.5 million in seed funding from Exfinity Fund and GrowX Ventures. Exfinity was floated a little over a year ago by former honchos of IT bellwether Infosys, while GrowX is an early stage investment firm in Delhi.

From Silicon Valley to India, with AI

Apart from the magic of MADstack, it’s the tech credentials of its creators, who returned to India from Silicon Valley last year, that drew the interest of such tech-savvy investors. Ashwini Asokan led the mobile innovation team at Intel’s Interaction and Experience Research Lab. Her husband, and Mad Street Den co-founder, Anand Chandrasekaran was part of an AI team at Stanford University that built Neurogrid – a device that simulates the neurons and synapses of the brain to control bionic limbs.

The two would talk late into the night about the possibilities of using smartphones to bring artificial intelligence and computer vision out of the labs into everyday things like shopping and gaming. Then, one fine day they packed up from the Valley, returned to their home town of Chennai, and bootstrapped Mad Street Den.

Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran, co-founders of Mad Street Den

Initially, they got the smartphone camera to detect facial expressions, and respond appropriately. For example, a frown could stop an unwanted call.

To see a frown and know what it means is simple enough for a human brain, but it is a very complex thing for a smartphone camera – it’s computer vision with artificial intelligence that enables this. “The idea is to make machines more useful by making them a bit human: fun, intelligent, and relevant,” Ashwini Asokan had told Tech in Asia back then in August 2014.

Visual search for online shopping

The possibilities of using this technology are endless, but Mad Street Den is now focused on commercial uses with the biggest demand – such as using a smartphone camera image to search for matching objects on an ecommerce site. “Visual search has become our flagship product during this period,” Asokan tells Tech in Asia. “This is our big bet for the coming few months.”

Amazon’s Fire Phone also has visual search capability, but it’s limited to products on Amazon. MADstack, on the other hand, is available on the cloud for use with any smartphone on any ecommerce site, from Amazon’s rivals in India, Flipkart and Snapdeal, to niche sites like Limeroad and Zivame. Apart from finding matching objects, it also makes personalized recommendations based on the given picture. Besides, the AI-powered platform has takers beyond ecommerce. “We’re trying to cover India quickly and expand into the rest of Asia as well with ecommerce, mobile gaming and analytics.” says Asokan.