Quantta - a start up that is spilling secrets to Starbucks, McDonald's

Quantta is now setting up Quantta Labs in Silicon Valley as well

There’s a startup in India quietly crunching enormous amounts of dark data. Quantta Analytics is digesting unstructured data – text messages, documents, email, video and audio files, and still images. It also ingests stuff from the deep web – everything online that is not indexed by search engines, including anonymous, inaccessible sites known as the “dark web,” and spilling its secrets to about a hundred entities paying for it.

You aren’t likely to have heard of Quantta as even its website says too little. The site almost makes the company look like some kind of family-run business with siblings Ritesh Bawri, Malvika Bawri, and Vinay Bawri, who used to run a multi-million dollar cement company, at the helm.

For now, it is mostly large financial institutions like State Bank of India (SBI), Kotak, and Fullerton paying Quantta for its intelligence. There are some from other industries like retail, hospitality, healthcare, energy, and food as well – like McDonald’s and Starbucks.

Bawri gives me an example of what Quantta can do: “Imagine a voice conversation taking places between me and my Pakistani handler. I am chatting with him using an unregistered device and he is giving me instructions on what to do, discussing terror activities. In a perfect world, you should be able to suck in that conversation, transcribe it into text on top of which you can do a keyword search and say what these guys were talking about.”

“The use-cases for their [Quantta’s] product are limitless,” says Rohan Malhotra, co-founder of Investopad, who introduced the startup to me.

Quantta recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding from unnamed investors – “they are all renowned entrepreneurs and investors from across India and Silicon Valley,” Bawri says.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here