When a B2B startup has customers using its platform while at the gym, it is a good chance it is onto something big for the business community.
That is what Sat (Satyam) Ramphal said is happening when customers start using Maya AI.
Ramphal describes Maya as “a digital human” for market research and strategy. “She looks at the market and she looks at your company data, and she builds inferences and insights in nanoseconds from that without any sort of human input at all,” he added.
The platform builds matrices on top of the customer data with insights from commodity data, shipping data, competitor data, cultural data, and general market trends. The platform integrates with data warehousing tools like AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks – all commonly-used cloud and software companies — to help business leaders best sense of where their industry is moving.
Maya then sends insights back to customers via text message, voice, or even Zoom for convenient business insights.
The early-stage startup has attracted customers in retail and pharmaceutical industries. Retailers are learning key insights on how to improve their supply chains and optimize pricing while pharma companies are leveraging Maya’s deep learning capabilities for new drug discovery and product launches.
Customers can then ask Maya hyper-specific questions and ultimately have full-blown strategy sessions.
“What’s very interesting is that when most people talk to Maya, they are talking to her in the gym and in their bedroom,” added Ramphal. “People that I talk to about that say that is when they are most creative.” Those customers are then able to have strategy conversations based on new business ideas that come up. “It’s not like talking to Siri. It’s a full blown strategic conversation,” he added.
Brotherly Love In Artificial Intelligence
Ramphal is no stranger to running a company. Prior to Maya AI he built up four data-driven companies in professional services, marketing, call center, and software development spaces. Maya AI is his first foray into the tech and AI space specifically.
Sat is building Maya AI with his two brothers, Sean and Shivam.
“I would not give up my team for literally anything in the world,” Sat told Hypepotamus. “I enjoy working with my brothers. We complement each other so well with our skills…and the biggest thing is that we have failed together. We were resilient enough to stay together to solve a problem and go back into business together.”
Shivam is leading the AI work while Sean is heading up the marketing and user experience side of the business. As the CEO, Sat says it is his job to raise capital, hire talent, and onboard new customers.
The concept for Maya AI was born out of the frustration he and his brothers felt at their previous companies and their desire to better understand market trends and changes.
The name of the company has multiple meanings. Meaning illusion in Sanskrit and mother in Greek mythology, Sat said Maya has many associations with power and direction. But it also stands for Me And You Always, an acronym that the startup came up with while building their digital human platform.
The team is currently raising its pre-seed round but bootstrapped its way for the first year and a half.
