According to the founder Ankur Garg, learnings from iamWire and Wirefoot (previous business endeavors), helped him explore opportunities in the content space, leading to a discovery of massive future opportunity in Media Consumption via Content Marketing and AI based Delivery. These experiences and learning motivated him to start Hotify. India has always been a huge opportunity in the media space. And the founders believe that the recent shift towards mobile internet and local news in our country will make the product more relevant to the current as well as the future scenario.
Hotify is an Artificially Intelligent Personal Assistant, that recommends micro personalized & contextually relevant information to its “Users”. It was founded in January 2015 and is based out of Bangalore. Hotify aims to be the leading information distribution platform for “Publishers” in all key internet markets globally.
In the news and content space, with a plethora of sources and information, the people now want a guide and here come an artificially intelligent personal assistant. The users not only know what are the best available options but also they are oblivious to what they actually want. Hotify, a news app, aims to solve this pertaining problem and develop an AI-based personal assistant that would recommend people only the news they want.
The core team comprises of Ankur Garg, Alok Gautam, Yuvraj Gurung and Aakash Porwal.
Ankur, (co-founder) is an IIT-Bombay alumnus. He has over a decade of experience in digital content. He has founded AllSchoolStuff.com, Internet Retail Expo, and iamwire.com. He has an ardent dedication towards the enterprise, strong belief in his ideas and hard earned experience as an insider in the marketplace, a deep understanding of the subtleties of the competitive landscape.
Alok Gautam, (co-founder) is an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, having at hand a 4-year experience of living in a hermitage at Rishikesh practicing nuances of mind and a thorough understanding of varied disciplines of physics and philosophy, his favorite being Quantum Physics. He keeps challenging the team reiterating his favorite line “Figure it out”.
Yuvraj Gurung has over a decade of work experience in media-based companies like The New Indian Express, Yahoo! and the Tribune Company. He is an alumnus of the Asian College of Journalism. Yuvraj plays a role of an industry veteran in our team, intertwining his experience of the news world with his understanding of what the users like.
Aakash Porwal is the creative UX Guy. Aakash had co-founded Space Aura, a high-altitude balloon aerospace startup and Rocket Hike, a venture on Digital marketing solution, catering to celebrities & startups. With deep dwelling interest in creativity and innovation, he works on the improvement of the user experience through new ways of designing user interfaces.
Team Hotify has blended state of the art AI technologies with the latest research in cognitive sciences to create a machine which predicts the specific needs of individual users and serves them accordingly. Also, they are supplementing the machine with inputs from Indian Spirituality. This makes them different from any other player out in the market.
With a holistic approach towards AI and Recommender Systems (RS) – Hotify is using multi-layer neural nets extensively in all key areas – Content Processing / Semantics, Summary & Curation, User Traits & Personality Biases, Behaviour & Context and much more. With all of these happening in “Real-time”
The team claims that technologically they do not have a comparable in India that matches their prowess. Most of the other players are tech-light and user-acquisition heavy. Hotify’s strategy is to invest on Technology & Product build-out, with no editors, to scale up rapidly & efficiently in the back-end.
Hotify has raised their first round of funding of 150K USD in January and has since been in the process of developing a recommendation engine. Hotify is witnessing great activity going on with products like Viv (by the creator of Siri), Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft), Echo (Amazon), Google Now, M (Facebook), Amy, Cubic etc.
PLAN OF ACTION
Hotify is live on android and soon they will have a Conversational UI which will require no or minimum inputs from users – a smart personal assistant who learns & is pro-active. With the aim of targeting 650 million users in India, the team is modeling complex, critical techniques like Concept drifts, Predictive collaborative filters, Serendipity to enhance user experience and grow organically. The team plans to patent a few of these key multi-layer neural net algorithms later next year.
THE IDEA
Hotify is an Artificially Intelligent Personal Assistant, that recommends micro personalized & contextually relevant information to its “Users”. It was founded in January 2015 and is based out of Bangalore. Hotify aims to be the leading information distribution platform for “Publishers” in all key internet markets globally.
In the news and content space, with a plethora of sources and information, the people now want a guide and here come an artificially intelligent personal assistant. The users not only know what are the best available options but also they are oblivious to what they actually want. Hotify, a news app, aims to solve this pertaining problem and develop an AI-based personal assistant that would recommend people only the news they want.
MEET THE MAKERS
The core team comprises of Ankur Garg, Alok Gautam, Yuvraj Gurung and Aakash Porwal.
Ankur, (co-founder) is an IIT-Bombay alumnus. He has over a decade of experience in digital content. He has founded AllSchoolStuff.com, Internet Retail Expo, and iamwire.com. He has an ardent dedication towards the enterprise, strong belief in his ideas and hard earned experience as an insider in the marketplace, a deep understanding of the subtleties of the competitive landscape.
Alok Gautam, (co-founder) is an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, having at hand a 4-year experience of living in a hermitage at Rishikesh practicing nuances of mind and a thorough understanding of varied disciplines of physics and philosophy, his favorite being Quantum Physics. He keeps challenging the team reiterating his favorite line “Figure it out”.
Yuvraj Gurung has over a decade of work experience in media-based companies like The New Indian Express, Yahoo! and the Tribune Company. He is an alumnus of the Asian College of Journalism. Yuvraj plays a role of an industry veteran in our team, intertwining his experience of the news world with his understanding of what the users like.
Aakash Porwal is the creative UX Guy. Aakash had co-founded Space Aura, a high-altitude balloon aerospace startup and Rocket Hike, a venture on Digital marketing solution, catering to celebrities & startups. With deep dwelling interest in creativity and innovation, he works on the improvement of the user experience through new ways of designing user interfaces.
USP
Team Hotify has blended state of the art AI technologies with the latest research in cognitive sciences to create a machine which predicts the specific needs of individual users and serves them accordingly. Also, they are supplementing the machine with inputs from Indian Spirituality. This makes them different from any other player out in the market.
TARGET MARKET
With a holistic approach towards AI and Recommender Systems (RS) – Hotify is using multi-layer neural nets extensively in all key areas – Content Processing / Semantics, Summary & Curation, User Traits & Personality Biases, Behaviour & Context and much more. With all of these happening in “Real-time”
The team claims that technologically they do not have a comparable in India that matches their prowess. Most of the other players are tech-light and user-acquisition heavy. Hotify’s strategy is to invest on Technology & Product build-out, with no editors, to scale up rapidly & efficiently in the back-end.
FUNDING
Hotify has raised their first round of funding of 150K USD in January and has since been in the process of developing a recommendation engine. Hotify is witnessing great activity going on with products like Viv (by the creator of Siri), Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft), Echo (Amazon), Google Now, M (Facebook), Amy, Cubic etc.
PLAN OF ACTION
Hotify is live on android and soon they will have a Conversational UI which will require no or minimum inputs from users – a smart personal assistant who learns & is pro-active. With the aim of targeting 650 million users in India, the team is modeling complex, critical techniques like Concept drifts, Predictive collaborative filters, Serendipity to enhance user experience and grow organically. The team plans to patent a few of these key multi-layer neural net algorithms later next year.
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