Former Snapdeal chief product officer Anand Chandrasekaran has invested an undisclosed amount in Uncanny Vision, two people familiar with the matter told VCCircle.
Uncanny Vision Solutions Pvt. Ltd is a business-to-business (B2B) startup that offers computer vision solutions for robotics, android applications, video surveillance and advanced driver assistance systems. Its main product is an intelligent surveillance camera that uses deep learning for scene/face/human pose recognition.
UncannyCV, one of its products, allows for faster vehicle detection, lane departure, pedestrian/face detection, and object tracking. Besides, UncannyDL is an on-device deep learning library used for automotive drive assistance, robots/drones, enhanced mobile e-commerce and Internet of Things.
Ranjith Parakkal, chief executive and co-founder of the startup, confirmed the development.
Uncanny Vision was founded in 2013 by engineers Parakkal and Navanee Sundaramoorthy. Parakkal, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Science, was previously working with Texas Instruments, while Sundaramoorthy was previously with semiconductor company Xilinx Inc.
In January this year, Uncanny Vision was one of the three winners of the ‘Qualcomm Design in India Challenge’ organised by the chipmaker. The startup received $100,000 as part of the award. Last year, the startup was one of the winners at Mumbai-based accelerator Zone Startups’ Next Big Idea contest.
Chandrasekaran has been a prolific angel investor in the past year and a half. His investments in 2017 include YellowAnt, which provides an intelligent bot assistant; HeyMojo, which offers chatbots that connect hotels and restaurants with their guests; Silversparro, which provides deep learning solutions; Oro Wealth, a mutual fund and wealth advisory firm; Classhop, a fitness activities aggregator; Fynd, a fashion e-commerce portal; and LetsVenture, which connects startups with investors and industry experts.
Chandrasekaran emerged as one of the top angel investors in 2016, adding 20 companies to his portfolio compared with 15 in 2015. His investments from last year include ed-tech startup Makkajai, mobile payments company ToneTag, home rental startup NoBroker, mobile analytics platform MoEngage, and fashion discovery app Wooplr.
He previously led the product division at Snapdeal and, in September last year, was hired by Facebook to help develop strategies for its Messenger app.
Before joining Snapdeal, Chandrasekaran spearheaded the launch of several technology initiatives as Bharti Airtel’s chief product officer during a 13-month stint. Before Bharti Airtel, he was senior director at Internet giant Yahoo in California, US.
