Driven by urge to make ‘local for global’, Pune man inspired by Rancho from 3 Idiots wins AI award

However, a desire to create a product led Pansare to launch a company, Rubiscape, which won the Award of Merit for Excellence in Best AI Technology Product Startup at the 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence a few weeks ago.

The beginning

Pansare says that way back in 2004, he had decided to turn into a first-generation entrepreneur, specialising in business intelligence and analytics. Inteliment Technologies, the firm that he had created that year, began to provide solutions and services in business intelligence and data warehousing, among others. His clients were Fortune 500 companies.

But what troubled him, as India became a global IT superpower, was that the country was not doing enough in product innovation or product development. “When we were creating solutions for our national and international customers, we always hit the glass ceiling in terms of tool flexibility. This was because we had to depend on foreign companies and their technologies, which were complex, expensive and proprietary,” he says.

What is Rubiscape

Rubiscape, set up four years ago under the government of India’s Digital Startup Programme, was one of India’s early Data Science and Machine Learning platforms.

The innovative product enables companies to use data to run advanced analytics in areas ranging from customer experience. climate change, video analytics and demand forecasting. Companies can use it for future skilling and innovation incubation, among others.

“Having built a product, we were pleasantly surprised when we began to be approached by public sector companies, government institutions as well as the defence. We have signed deals with the defence establishments as well as IITs and several large enterprises,” he says.

This year, the company is focussing on building Indian products for the global market. “Our motto is to make local for global,” he says.

Bootstrapped companies, such as Rubiscape, which have small teams of young graduate engineers, among others, rarely experience a day without challenges. Among others, there is stiff competition and pricing pressure from established brands. “My learning is that you just have to keep walking. You have to go on constructing the path in product business as there is no ready-made path that you can simply follow,” he says.

“When we were given the CII award, my reaction was that this award has many winners,” he adds.