Ex-Mu Sigma executives start AI company; get $6 million from Sequoia

Top ex-Mu Sigma executives Shelly Singh, Deepinder Dhingra and Pavan Palety have come together to launch Samya.ai, an artificial intelligence enterprise revenue growth company focused on the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. The firm which was in a stealth mode has also raised $6 million in seed round funding led by venture capital Sequoia India with participation from other angel investors and advisors. 

The global CPG industry loses 8-10 per cent revenue growth per year due to increased scale, complexity and volatility at the intersection of demand and supply operations. This loss is estimated to be $150 billion globally. Samya.ai aims to address this problem.

“Demand-supply interactions are becoming very unpredictable and vulnerable, resulting in huge lost revenue opportunity. This trend will continue unless addressed proactively, especially when a large number of CPG companies have been facing saturating growth,” said Samya.ai co-founder and CEO Shelly Singh.

Singh, Dhingra and Palety had previously held leadership positions at organizations including IBM, Noodle.ai, Mu Sigma and MarketsandMarkets. Singh and Dhingra were also instrumental in scaling data analytics company Mu Sigma to become a ‘unicorn’ or a startup valued at more than $1 billion.

Samya said most of the loss in the CPG industry is due to inefficiencies at the intersection of the core sales and distribution, pricing and promotions and inventory operations. Each of these teams often works in silos, operate on different legacy systems, optimize for different metrics and are unable to anticipate and proactively learn emerging patterns, blind-spots and interdependencies in their activities. The impact of external factors such as evolving weather conditions, macro-economics, consumer preferences further escalates the problem.

Samya claimed it is the only revenue growth AI company in the CPG space addressing these issues holistically. Its unique approach maps use the power of AI and machine learning methods such as deep learning, probabilistic machine learning and reinforcement learning that can adapt to the unique challenges of this sector. With purpose-built and interconnected AI software-as-a-service modules, Samya said it is driving disruptive value and 10X improvement over other solutions.

“AI and ML-powered learning and recommendation systems that augment front line decision-makers are needed to plug revenue leakage,”  said Deepinder Dhingra, co-founder and chief product officer at Samya. “We are building a category-defining product by assembling the best AI and ML and engineering team in this space based out of Bengaluru.”

Samya said it is currently running proof of value engagements with a few Fortune 500 companies and is seeing promising initial results. “In the long term we want to build a large and diverse ecosystem of partners and advisors who can help us drive customer success globally,” said Pavan Palety, Samya’s third co-founder and chief customer officer.

Samya’s other initial investors include Ashish Gupta, founder of Junglee.com and Helion VC, Deb Henretta, Partner, G100 Companies and Ex-Group President, P&G, and Arijit Sengupta, founder of Kradle Ventures and Antuit Inc.

“I have had the privilege to work closely with Shelly (Singh) and Deepinder (Dhingra) for many years at Mu Sigma, and am very excited to get a chance to work with both of them and Pavan (Palety) in building Samya.ai,” said Shailendra Singh, managing director, Sequoia Capital (India) Singapore. “They are pursuing a bold vision and the early results of ‘proof of value’ pilots with global CPG companies are very exciting. Our goal here is to help build one of the leading cross- border AI SaaS companies out of India,” he added.