Five startups have been identified by Digital Dossier as utilizing cutting-edge technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and others, to offer a variety of solutions in various fields. Women who are enthusiastic about the causes they support co-founded each of these startups.
Plop: Chat storytelling
Plop is the brainchild of Anushka Shetty who is trying to carve a new entertainment category of digital storytelling. What inspired Shetty to explore story telling was that people spend a lot of time on social media and texting apps. “This is when we thought that people are very comfortable texting and consuming large amounts of content via messenger and other chatting apps. So can we tell amazing stories in the form of chat messages?” Thus Plop started in early 2018 along with co-founder Vineet Shetty.
“We currently use many of the mobile phones’ native features like vibration, and backlights to add special effects to the stories. And we are experimenting with virtual reality to make the stories come alive,” say Shetty. A majority of Plop’s users come from developed countries like the US, Japan and New Zealand.
Wysa: Building emotional resilience
An AI-powered “emotionally intelligent” bot called Wysa seeks to teach people how to become more emotionally resilient. To help you develop mental resilience abilities and feel better, Touchkin created an AI-based virtual coach that reacts to your expressed emotions and applies evidence-based cognitive-behavioral treatments (CBT), breathing exercises, yoga, and meditation. Wysa also keeps track of your activities and sleep.
“Wysa is an attempt to scale mental health support using AI. People are more comfortable talking anonymously to an AI bot about their issues. Available 24X7, Wysa doesn’t judge or give opinions. It just asks the right questions to guide you through self-help techniques” says Jo Aggarwal, co-founder, Wysa.
Wysa has a current user base of over 300,000 people from more than 30 countries across age groups. Agarwal claims 600,000 people have talked to Wysa till date, and 21 people have written to the company to say the bot saved their life. The Journal of Medical Internet research (JMIR) recently published a peer-reviewed study showing that using Wysa can significantly reduce symptoms of depression, according to Agarwal. The company is also adding voice and language support so that Wysa can be available on AI assistants like Google Assistant.
Flyrobe: Renting designer wear online
Three IIT Bombay grads, Shreya Mishra, Pranay Surana, and Tushar Saxena, launched Flyrobe, the top clothes rental firm in India. Flyrobe was established in September 2015 and provides men’s and women’s fashionable clothing for rent in 15 Indian cities. We have the DNA of a technological company just as much as a fashion company. Flyrobe co-founder Shreya Mishra stated, “We have also developed proprietary in-house technology for our back-end operations that we use extensively for logistics management, inventory management, and customer service.” According to Flyrobe, it has over 0.5 million app installs and 0.5 million monthly visitors to their website. Additionally, it was one of the 17 global start-ups chosen for Google’s Launchpad Accelerator program in 2016.
