Machine Learning/Deep Learning was maturing and starting to be adopted during the 2016-2017 time. We came to know of an initiative of KSUM called future technologies lab which is an R/D facility catering to the industry 4.0 technologies like AI, Robotics, AR/VR, BCI, IoT & Cybersecurity. Though hesitant, Pranoy and I decided to give it a try. Coming to future technologies lab was the turning point that we had.
We got access to the cloud servers to run deep learning algorithms. We were able to use NVIDIA Tesla P100 which was the then state of the art GPU Machine worth 20k USD. The benefit here was if this was not available we would have had to depend on AWS servers which would have brought a severe cash burn and staying lean and capital-efficient was key. We were exposed to a rich and vibrant ecosystem of other startups and other technology experts working on ai and other future technologies. This resulted in peer learning, which was very effective and also helped us quickly grasp the know-how of how to build a product that customers would want and a lot of essential practical startup advice.
