Quantela, a smart city enabler and outcomes-as-a-service provider with over a 100 smart city deployments across the globe, today announced a strategic investment in Silicon Valley founded and Singapore based Graymatics, a cognitive multimedia analytics company with an industry-leading AI platform to transform installed CCTV video feeds into compelling customer-centric solutions in different industry verticals.
The all-equity deal would give Quantela a minority shareholding in Graymatics with significant strategic and Go-To-Market (GTM) alignment, and help build comprehensive capabilities in video analytics into its AI-driven smart solutions for its target markets spanning smart cities, buildings, education campuses, public spaces and commercial establishments.
For Graymatics, which caters to industries such as surveillance, telecom, media and advertising, retail and e-commerce; the deal opens doors for it to be a part of global smart city projects through Quantela.
Graymatics provides video analytics solutions to different smart cities especially in the East Zone of India, and various smart spaces (including buildings, highways, ports, airports, telecom carriers) in Singapore, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Japan, Korea to enhance safety, security, operational efficiency and customer experience.
“Looking from the lens of technology maturity, adaptability and affordability; this is the right time for us to scale globally by enhancing Quantela’s smart city platforms, which have strong real-time data analytics capabilities, with the power of video analytics to deliver more meaningful and measurable outcomes for city administrators and citizens”, stated Sridhar Gadhi, Founder and Chairman, Quantela Inc. speaking about this strategic investment. He added, “This will help accelerate Quantela’s journey to improve the liveability of cities and the quality of life of citizens.”
Explaining the investment rationale, Amr Salem, CEO, Quantela Inc., said, “A live video stream has data that is dynamic, usually requiring manual surveillance. Most video analytics companies are unable to analyse the actual video content in real-time. Graymatics, with its real-time indexing, analysis and classification of videos and images is innovative in this respect.” He further said, “Our investment in Graymatics will give Quantela the competitive edge to tap into opportunities to enhance public safety by tracking suspicious behaviour and abandoned objects; improve traffic flow and crowd management; help detect traffic violations through number plate recognition and also identify littering patterns for better waste management.”
The scope of application of Graymatics’ video analytics can also be extended to digital kiosks and signages at public spaces which can help city administrators and commercial establishments in better monetization. In the post-pandemic world, the use of facial recognition and video tools could be extended to tracking adherence to social distancing, use of masks etc.
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Abhijit Shanbhag, President and CEO, Graymatics said, “Today, video analytics is one of the fastest-growing industries and Graymatics is a frontrunner of innovation in this space. The utility for video analytics goes beyond security and can easily transcend into a powerful tool that can help us run our lives and cities more efficiently.” Speaking about the opportunities that lie ahead, Abhijit said, “Graymatics is excited to journey with Quantela as we create synergies between our offerings, creating definitive industry-leading solutions for the smart cities space and beyond.”
In India, Quantela partnered with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) to set up the first-of-its-kind India Urban observatory in March 2019 to leverage data analytics for optimizing city operations, improving governance and enhancing the economic performance of cities across the country.
Since the pandemic outbreak, it has repurposed its smart city platform to launch CoVER (COVID Emergency Response platform) which is continuing to help governments, public health officials and city administrators to devise mitigation policies and predict hospital infrastructure requirements.
Backed by Digital Alpha, an investment firm focused on digital infrastructure and services required by the digital economy with an equity investment of US$ 10 million in 2018, Quantela was recently accorded ‘Minicorn’ status by data intelligence firm Tracxn and considered among the top emerging global companies in the smart cities space for 2020.