Kaushal Mahajan
1. Take us through the journey of Quantian Technologies? What led to its inception?
Quantian Technologies was founded in February of 2021 with a view to solve problems unique to managing remote and on-the-field workforce using modern and more efficient Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) techniques. Both the founders of the company have had extensive business operations experience running teams comprised of more than 5,000 staff and just like many leaders managing large, distributed teams, they too faced issues such as gauging correct productivity metrics, not having a ringside view of their operations on a single screen, truancy of their workers from their respective work locations etc. A decade or so back, such problems were attempted to be solved by automation, often deploying machine learning techniques. Both the founders have considerable experience and success running automation programs but they realized that technology solutions available then were inadequate. A more effective management approach to managing large, distributed teams was not just about productivity savings brought about by automation but also needed to aggregate information while at the same time preserving the decentralization inherent in geographically distributed teams.
While not a classic aha! moment, the realization of this gap in managing large remote teams as well as the future potential of A.I techniques to resolve this gap was a result of deliberate analysis driven by personal experiences (of the founders). That is the story behind the genesis of Quantian Technologies.
2. What major challenges has Quantian Technologies faced since its inception, and how were they overcome?
We have solved many challenges in our journey thus far but I would like to pick two to mention here: the first due to its uniqueness and the second due to its significance to the business.
Firstly, right after the company was formed, the largest Covid-19 wave hit India with Maharashtra experiencing four phases of lockdowns from April to June in 2021. Since the company was in a product design phase and needed its employees to actively brainstorm with each other to build the screens, workflows and A.I. algorithms, progress took a backseat, even coming to a halt in some periods. The company, however, stood by its focus and its people and maintained their salaries and even carried out a modicum of remote work through this period. The team rallied around marvelously, and we did what we could remotely, but the real progress commenced only after the lockdown restrictions were removed and we could get back into the office.
Secondly, the applicability of the remote workforce management solutions designed by the company are across industries, geographies and functions. The company therefore had a challenge of spreading its focus all over the place and not achieving traction in terms of early adoption and feedback from its first valuable customers. The company decided not to boil the ocean, and instead initially focused on two industries which by their inherent nature employed a large number of remote workers: construction and facilities management. This focus allowed the company to customize features that would be needed by such companies such as live tracking of itinerant employees, A.I. driven shift management and auto-shift allocation, virtual perimeter ring fencing of workers to a specified work area, internet-free operations, etc.
3. What different aspects is Quantian Technologies/Optick bringing to the table that makes it stand apart from its counterparts?
We are one of the few companies in the world today solely focused on solving operational problems in managing any form of itinerant workforce or people. The fact that A) we use modern A.I techniques such as Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing tools, Chatbots and that B) we have a consultative approach to problem identification and solutioning make us uniquely positioned in the market. The Quant in the company's name stands for the company's special prowess to extract quantitative and other actionable insights from field operations data and present them in via engaging dashboard palettes to our customers' management. Our edge computing capabilities also allow our solution to operate without internet which is greatly useful in low and no internet zones especially in remote areas. We believe that we do it very differently and distinctly from our competition.
Given the extensive R&D, our processing algorithms are able to process field operations related tasks in a very resource efficient manner thereby making us the best value service provider on a price vs value assessment.
4. How many companies use your software, annually? What does growth look like for the future?
80,000 users spread across 60 customers of ours use Optick (our flagship operations management software) as part of their daily activities. We plan to grow Optick's user base aggressively in India in the coming months and introduce product extensions and new functionalities under the Optick family of products. Once we have sufficient traction in the country we plan to expand overseas as well in a couple of years.
We also plan to offer complimentary services and products to the daily users of Optick once the user base crosses 200,000.
5. Could you shed some light on your tie-ups and partnerships so far? Are there any agreements that are in the pipeline?
We are member of Nasscom product connect ecosystem and are also partnered with Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), TiE-Delhi as part of the Ministry of Electronics & IT (Meity) startup initiative. We are also part of number of cohorts led by IIM Kozhikode, India Accelerator, Startup India.
6. Highlight some latest technological integrations in your products.
We are part of incubation programs of tech majors like Google, Microsoft and NVIDIA. We have integrated with a number of cutting-edge capabilities e.g Maps API, OpenAI/Azure integration. We also have integration with Govt of India's Aadhaar platform for user identity verification. Currently we are working on integrations with market leading biometric hardware providers like eSSL.
7. How big is the market opportunity in the remote workforce management industry?
The global remote workforce market is expected to be around $80 billion by 2030. After the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of remote employees has been growing at the rate of 14.3% per annum. Around 70% of the 90 million new jobs anticipated in India are expected to be created in the blue-collar workforce space which is the prime focus area of Quantian Technologies.
As per a recent survey conducted by Deloitte and the Manpower Group, only 24% of business leaders felt that their organizations are prepared and ready to deal with the challenges of remote and hybrid work trend effectively. This presents an attractive opportunity for Quantian Technologies.
8. Lastly, what are your long-term and short-term expansion plans?
We are viewing growth from a three-dimensional perspective: to grow the customer base of our flagship Optick product; to develop new product features, add-ons and extensions to Optick; and, to grow the variety of customer industries and use-cases therein serviced by us.
In the short term, we intend to grow our customer base via aggressive investments in our sales function. We intend to develop activity-based tracking and productivity assessment tools as well as skill development and training tools as product extensions. In terms of variety of customer industries and use-cases, we intend to expand into the infrastructure, distribution, agriculture value chain, travel and hospitality, after-sales services industries in the short term.
In the longer term, our expansion in the customer base would involve us selling to customers outside India. We also intend to offer value added services including third party fee-based services to our user base once it reaches an adequate size such as skill development services, financial products, etc. in the longer term.
