Exclusive Interview with Abhijit Shanbhag, President, and CEO, Graymatics

By S G Rickman On Jun 13, 2022

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Graymatics is among the leading cognitive multimedia processing companies internationally. The company offers one of the most advanced and diversified ranges of video AI applications to extract insights and deliver highly impactful solutions based on CCTV networks. Our technology uses the cloud, AI, Data Analytics, and IoT tools, and can work with the existing CCTV networks as well. Apart from Singapore where the company is headquartered, Graymatics now has a significant footprint in countries such as India, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, USA, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, UAE, UK, Lebanon & others.

There are various verticals that Graymatics serves currently. There are solutions for smart cities, transportation, smart buildings, manufacturing facilities, smart banks, and the retail sector. The company has also created a customized home and neighborhood security solution called PadoSee. It utilizes the power of AI and deep learning algorithms to offer a complete suite of end-to-end solutions for homes that eliminate the need for human monitoring. The solution is fully customizable to suit the specific needs of homeowners, and it can be seamlessly scaled to analyze one camera as effectively as hundreds. Graymatics has created solutions for smart buildings which can take care of construction monitoring as well as building surveillance for the real-estate sector.

The clientele of Graymatics has deployed the solutions in highly challenging and customized arenas such as management of surveillance and monitoring at a high-altitude railway tunnel in India, and even oil and gas platforms. The flexibility and potential offered by the system make it ideal for custom deployment in almost any area of operations for commercial, administrative, security, and even defense needs.

With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

While it became possible to monitor large spaces, buildings, and even cities with the rise in digital video content generation and sharing, and the evolution of CCTV networks, the quality of surveillance intelligence declined. It is impossible to deploy human security teams everywhere, and conventional CCTVs merely stream or record the visuals captured by cameras. This is where I wanted to use advanced technologies such as AI to create smart solutions that could not only monitor spaces, but also analyze the feed and detect the actions and behavior of people in a discreet, automated, and effective manner.

Initially launched in Silicon Valley, we subsequently set up Graymatics in Singapore, and we are now present in 15+ countries. We are focusing on building a highly scalable platform capable of collecting actionable data from videos and images and presenting it to the users to enable decision-making. For instance, a traffic surveillance camera equipped with our technology can monitor vehicular movement and detect violations.

Graymatics has grown significantly since its inception. Today, we offer a diversity of solutions to clients across verticals such as smart cities, transportation, smart buildings, manufacturing facilities, smart banks, and the retail sector in several countries. We are now aiming to grow our global footprint, research and development capabilities, and market coverage in the times ahead.

What is your biggest USP that diﬀerentiates the company from competitors?

At Graymatics, we use the most advanced technologies and have built our proprietary software as well as solutions to deliver best-in-class results to our clients. We have been constantly enhancing its core technology stack and customizing it to suit the industry-specific need of clients, in a way that is unmatched by the competitors. One of Graymatics’ biggest differentiators is the scale on which the technology can operate. The company can provide more than 100 AI-powered analytics parameters, most of which have federated learning capability to enable continuous performance optimization with a lower infrastructure input. Graymatics has also developed innovative tools to automatically annotate data with minimum manual intervention and transfer them for different analytics needs as per the industry vertical where the system is deployed in.

Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

We have built several solutions after extensive research and these are tried and tested in diverse settings to ensure consistent and accurate results. Our products are being used by clients across verticals such as security and surveillance, digital marketing, e-commerce, telecommunications, IoT, etc.

Our major solutions include the following:

Labvista – Labvista is a video streaming analysis platform for smart laboratories and factories. It has been helping clients with smart manufacturing, staff and visitor analytics, detection of workplace accidents, process optimization, safety compliance, quality control, etc.

Urban Vision – Urban Vision is a video analytics solution for smart cities. It covers two different areas of deployment: Smart infrastructure, and smart public services.

Vistamart – We have built Vistamart to transform retail operations through smart technologies. The system uses cognitive media analysis to monitor customer demographics such as age, ethnicity, gender, and even emotions of the customer.

SiteInsights–It is a solution aimed at empowering building managers and security teams to keep track of safety and security environments within the premises. The solution can work at the same efficiency 24/7, enabling a superior security and surveillance outcome compared to manual monitoring.

G-Safe – This is a smart system for the banking sector wherein the analysis of customer profiles, time spent on-premises, queue patterns, unidentified object detection, etc are carried out and displayed in the form of easy-to-understand dashboards for the decision-makers and raising of alerts.

Puerto Vista – We have built a video analytical solution for the ports which can enhance security and surveillance through vehicle identification, monitoring of illegal parking, COVID analytics, social distancing, improving vessel detection and access management, etc.

PadoSee – This is a smart AI and deep learning-powered algorithms-powered solution that offers end-to-end home security coverage automatically and efficiently. It can be customized as per the needs of an individual homeowner or apartment complex. This scalable solution can analyze one camera or hundreds of them, with the same efficiency.

How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

Graymatics has grown consistently and remarkably since its inception. Going forward, the vision is to rapidly scale international market coverage, enter new territories and generate a stronger presence in the countries covered so far. The company aims to develop research and development facilities and enhance its talent base. Graymatics is set to tap into larger global projects in areas such as smart cities, transportation, retail, and other major industries. With the nearly limitless potential of the technology and rising global demand, the company is now all set to expand coverage from the exiting 15 to over 30 countries across six continents by the end of 2022.

Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go-to-market strategy for the same?

Graymatics’ core focus areas at present are smart city projects, transportation, infrastructure and real estate, retail operations, healthcare, and other major industries. Considering the incredible potential and usability of video AI analytics in almost every sector, the company aims to develop customized solutions as per the client’s needs. Some of the use cases where Graymatics has proved its effectiveness include:

Real-estate – The system offers holistic surveillance and smart insight generation in buildings, residential complexes, and other public properties such as shopping malls, etc. It can be configured to monitor footfall, public behavior, facial identification as per the database attached, and even to detect intrusion and suspicious activities, violence or vandalism, etc.

Train and tunnels – Graymatics is playing a key role in ensuring safety and security inside & outside tunnels. The company is providing 18 different types of analytics for the project including various parameters on personnel and vehicular movement.

Metros –In the modern metro networks, Graymatics has been providing in-train, station as well as parking lot monitoring and surveillance services. Facial recognition and AI emotion detection are some of the features provided by the solution to proactively identify people and their emotional states and to enable timely interventions. These systems prove to be highly effective in preventing instances such as crime against women etc. and are being increasingly adopted in surveillance of urban metro train networks, airports, and major thoroughfares.

Where do you see growth coming in for the sector?

At present, North America is the company’s biggest market in terms of revenue and will continue to be the largest contributor to Graymatics’ growth. At the same time, the solutions are witnessing a lot of adoption in India. Apart from its existing offices, and the rapidly growing multi-industry footprint of Graymatics services, the company is also aiming to open additional development centers in India. The country is among the fastest-growing markets and with the extent of digitization taking place here, Graymatics is confident of achieving good traction in the years ahead.

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