Transforming CCTVs from passive devices to a compelling array of solutions: Graymatics

Meet Abhijit Shanbhag, the President, and CEO of Singapore-based Graymatics, a cognitive multimedia company renowned for its transformational technology and relevance in today’s urban and business safety landscape. With a vision to leverage technology to improve the world, Abhijit, a self-driven entrepreneur, launched Graymatics in 2011.

Since its inception, Abhijit’s leadership and the transformational capabilities of Graymatics have helped the firm create a massive uptick in demand for services like; smartphone apps, surveillance, and social media insights.

He aims to make Graymatics a highly scalable platform that can collect actionable data from various videos and images using the power of analytics, similar to how insights are generated from text.

Abhijit, a vastly experienced tech expert, started his entrepreneurial journey in 2001 by founding Scintera Networks, which soon developed the industry’s first programmable RF signal sensor, the lowest power multi-Gigabit signal processor in the industry. Before founding Scintera, Abhijit has served in organizations like Qualcomm, Ericsson, and Morphics.

He was the first awardee of the Global Executive Entrepreneur investment, and he has also received the Rising Star Innovator award from Singapore’s Prime Minister’s Office.

The Inception Story

As a serial entrepreneur, Abhijit once recognized a genuine problem with the massive proliferation of image and video content around us, with very few video content-aware tools like search, analytics, etc. With the internet being predominantly visual, CCTVs are becoming a common sight around us; these CCTVs create a massive amount of underutilized video content.

Abhijit remembers, “Search of content on video hosting platforms was entirely based on captions, and CCTVs were installed more for deterrence than for proper exploitation.”

So, he saw a massive opportunity to create a highly scalable, versatile cognitive platform that could analyze huge volumes of video content in near real-time and convert the content into machine understandable data. He knew this platform could immediately transform CCTVs from passive devices to a compelling array of solutions.

Abhijit and his team had a clear vision of transforming all video content, devices, and sensors into compelling solutions that will eventually make our society even more secure. Along with Abhijit, the founding team comprised some of the greatest minds from Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.

Graymatics received its initial funding from Citrix Systems and Singapore’s Prime Minister’s office. Soon, the firm developed its platform, which later came to be called the Deep Learning platform, which can handle huge volumes of videos and internet images and convert them into in-depth analytics in the cloud.

Boosting Safety, Security, and Customer Experience

Headquartered in Singapore, with offices in Silicon Valley, Bangalore, and Chile, Graymatics has developed a massively scalable AI-based platform for deep multimedia analytics. With this industry-leading platform, CCTV-based video analytics solution solves a range of challenges for various industries, including; smart transportation, telecommunications, smart cities, manufacturing, retail, banks, etc. Additionally, the video analytics platform is being used to ensure appropriate covid behaviors, including mask adherence and crowd density management.

Currently, Graymatics provide its video analytics solutions to many smart cities in India and in places like large corporate campuses, highways, ports, commercial buildings, and corporations and telecom carriers in India, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, China, Japan, and Korea to boost safety, security, operational efficiency, and customer experience.

A Rapidly Growing Company

Over the past 10 years, Graymatics has seen rapid growth. However, Abhijit feels there are multiple threats from the competitors, and Graymatics needs to constantly adapt and upgrade its solutions to stay on the top of the market. The firm does extensive research to understand the pain points of end-users and gathers regular feedback for any scope of improvement. Pain points of end-users and gathers regular feedback for any scope of improvement. It is also involved in technical discussions and industry movements such as WEF. Additionally, Graymatics participates in relevant webinars with its industry partners and experts.

Tackling the Pandemic

With the pandemic, workplaces have come under greater scrutiny to ensure a covid safe environment for their employees. This gave Graymatics the chance to introduce CoVideo, as an additional solution to its existing offerings. Abhijit and his team leveraged the new regulations introduced during the pandemic to develop mask detection, crowding alert, and social distancing monitoring.

Abhijit feels that with easy access to AI and Covid-19, people are trying to leverage technology and analytics in every aspect of our lives to reduce human touchpoints. Due to this reason, Graymatics has been witnessing a growing demand for video analytics solutions as customers are looking to minimize human interaction as much as possible.

Future Roadmap

Abhijit envisions Graymatics as a global AI leader who can transform all existing CCTV infrastructure into useful solutions that greatly increase security, surveillance, customer experience, and operational processes. As an example, G-Safe, which is one of the latest offerings of Graymatics, can soon become the preferable solution to manage security and operations in banks.

Thanks to its innovative product solutions for various industries, the firm aims to make AI analytics accessible to many more countries and partners worldwide.