We all know that the data is the new fuel. Data in today’s world has that energy that cannot be imagined. The companies are running after the same. It gives you so much power and the results analyzed by it are the new tools that tell the companies how to move ahead, what customers want, and what should be the future course of action for the company.
Data Annonation
Data is being demanded by all the sectors of the economy, it only that told the world how many cases of COVID are there in world, it is through the predictions of the data that the expectation of the third wave of coronavirus can be expected. It is through data that a company knows what type of customers need to be targeted in order for the product to reach the right market. Data has the power and the capacity to bring changes in the world.
Many new courses are being come up in the country where young students are taught how to read the data, how to analyze it, how to make the best use of it. Data analysts and data scientists have become very common names in the country, with high-paying jobs, such names have become very popular and demanding in today’s world.
People confuse these analysts with ones running complicated codes, but they need to understand that running code is part of the job, not just the job. Determining good results from it is the main job. It is the data that tells the position of the company and its future.
Many startups are coming up which work on the data. They perform various tasks related to the data. The market size of the data annotation tools on the global size was estimated to be around USD 341.45 million in 2020, and is expected to increase at a CAGR of 27% between 2021 and 2026. One such startup is Data Annotation Startup- Playment.
The startup was founded in 2015 by the ex-employees of Flipkart, Siddarth Mall, Akshay Lal, both alumni of IIT Kharagpur and Ajinkya Malasne, an alumnus of IIT Guwahati. The startup is engaged in offering solutions to data in order to be able to build data annotations- which are high quality data visuals. The studio of the startup provides 2D and 3D labelling tools which are assisted by ML.
The Bengaluru based startup- Playment has been acquired by TELUS International as announced on July 6, 2021. The amount for which the digital consultancy of Vancouver has acquired the data annotation startup of India has not been disclosed. Playemt has been providing its offerings to more than 200 teams working on machine learning across the globe.
The startup has raised USD 2.5 billion in funding till date. The last funding of the startup was in 2017 when the funding round was led by YCombinator, Sparkland Capital, and Silicon Valley and had Ryan Petersen, Max Altmen and many others as the angel investors. The startup in this round had raised USD 1.6 billion. In 2016, it hd raised USD 700K in its seed round of funding from Elevation Capita. The startup has also been a part of YCombinator’s Winter 2017 batch and Google launchpad accelerator.
The startup deals in the visual kind which is related to Artificial Intelligence and machine learning software. 70% of the clients of the startup are automakers, it is engaged in helping the self learning software of its clients identify objects. The startup in 2015 had started providing big companies like Flipkart, Lazada, Ola, and Patym with services like cataloging and content moderation. The platform and the solution of Playment helped Flipkart im categorizing the products as many sellers on the Flipkart platform had no idea how to do it.
The technology used by the startup divides the large amount of work into micro small works like lego blocks and the users which are qualified for it engage themselves in solving the puzzle. The competitors of the company in India are iMerit and Infolks. On the global scale, its competitors are Scale AI and Appen.
The startup was looking out for investors and partners in the business when the founders met TELUS and rest is the history as it led to the acquisition of Playment. The startup has 85 employees and all of them will be joining TELUS when the acquisition is over. As of now, Playment has international clients like Samsung, Nuro- a US based self driving solution company, ZF- a German automotive tools,and Dailmer AG.
Ajinkya Malasne, the co-founder of Playment, said that with TELUS acting as the support and the driver, the startup hopes to reach the large number of clients on a global scale. He further said that are busy in aggressive hiring for such opportunities.
Let us see what new things this acquisition has in its place for the data world.
Edited by Aishwarya Ingle
