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StomatoBot - Intelligent Surveillance System

What is StomatoBot?

StomatoBot is aimed to solve the surveillance monitoring problem in near-real-time. CCTVs are installed at so many places, but no one monitors them 24x7 and so when some undesirable incident happens, we come to know many hours later mostly.

By the time the police gets its hands on the CCTV footage to investigate, the perpetrator of crime might have fled abroad and the victim might probably have died.

We are working towards solving this issue as the infrastructure is already there and is increasing rapidly, but due to lack of intelligence it is not being really helpful.

"To watch when no one is watching" is our motto!

Tell us more about your team ?

Anand Muglikar (BE Electronics) - CEO, MD and Gardener @ StomatoBot Technologies Pvt Ltd - 7 years in IT and Senior R&D Computer Vision roles as lead developer and mentor too @Tata, iGate(fka Patni), TouchMagix & Teleskin

Rajashri Shinde-Muglikar (BE Computer Science) - COO & CPE @ StomatoBot - 2.5 years teaching Computer Science & then Software Developer @IBM India 

Anil Muglikar (BSc Chemistry (Honours)) - CMO @ StomatoBot - 25+ years in various roles leading to Senior ones in Pharma Marketing at pharma companies including Blue Cross Labs

Dr Mukesh Kumar - Investor & Advisor

Mr Pandurang Shinde & Mr Rahul Shinde - F&F Investors

Team of Incredible Interns - Ashutosh Ranjan (VIT, Pune), Chinmay Savadikar (PVG, Pune), Deepak Dhole (VIT, Pune), Vedang Deshpande (VIT, Pune), Vaibhav Bhat (VIT, Pune), Aditya Kumar (VIT, Pune) & Shubham Dhatrak (VIT, Pune)


How did you come up with the idea ?​​

 I have been hooked to Computer Vision since my 2nd year in Engineering and have worked as a Software and Senior R&D engineer at large companies as well as few startups over the past 7-8 years. Whenever I saw news on TV which depicted some crime was committed and then later was found also caught on CCTV cameras, I felt helpless every single time and wished someone was monitoring the cameras. But expecting humans to tirelessly monitor the CCTV cameras is just too much to ask. 

Two very prominent incidents I remember are a woman being attacked inside an IDBI ATM in Bangalore and another one where a group of teenage girls was molested and physically abused on the streets of Guwahati by a mob of 40 men. 

This really was the trigger that made me form StomatoBot ultimately from the culmination of years of work and thinking for starting up something in Computer Vision. 

StomatoBot is also inspired by the ABC TV series Person of Interest. 


What problem are you solving ?

 a. Human Inefficiency:

With rising insecurity in the world of today, constant 24x7 supervision is imperative for one's premises. Most businesses prefer to have CCTV systems and cameras installed at key locations in their premises. However, most cameras go completely unmonitored eventually. Even those that have humans employed to monitor 24x7, face periods of unmonitoring due to boredom, low attention spans, nature calls, meal and refreshment breaks, tiredness and sleep. Also, such 24x7 monitoring is extremely costly due to the high hardware and software costs, employing humans in 3 shifts and also employing some standby humans keeping in mind redundancy / emergency. What we need is a better security system, one which understands what's happening.

b. Dumb Cameras:

CCTV systems are dumb machines that just keep recording whatever is visible in their field of view (FoV). So currently, their footage is only used/usable in post-incident investigative scenarios like post-mortems. By the time CCTV footage reaches authorities, many hours after a crime was committed, the level of police effectiveness in solving it decreases drastically.

c. Existing Video Monitoring Systems are premise-bound, offline, non-realtime, high cost and mobile-unfriendly.

Currently, in the CCTV systems in use today, the recorded footage at the most can be used for investigation but we cannot stop undesirable incidents because we are lagging behind the scene. We are unaware of the mishap/violence/crime while it was taking place though the CCTV cam could shoot it live. 


How does it work ?

The software itself runs on cloud and all the user or customer has to do is have a pre-installed CCTV system, a broadband internet connection and give us access to their CCTV system. 

All live footage is taken up to our cloud, processed and analyzed there and if something abnormal is found, we alert the customer on their email/mobile within 2-5 mins. That's how quick we're. 

So, we utilize the virtual eyes of cameras to make sense of the scene in it's Field of View (FoV) and alert the owner of the camera and/or local law enforcement agencies. Hence, we provide some Artificial Intelligence to the cameras. We do this using our strong and cutting edge R&D in Computer Vision, Image Processing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and now Deep Learning. Thats's what we're doing at StomatoBot!


What is your competitive advantage ?

We've recently filed a patent for our technology. Besides that, we are a small and agile team of focused researchers always on our toes and are abreast of the state-of-the-art in our technology and research. We know many companies who deal in Video analytics worldwide, but they're seldom mobile friendly. The most distinguishing factor is none of them has the daring to do the analytics in realtime. That's where we have a huge head start!


What is your target market ?

Our target market is basically any business or home which needs and is conscious of their security. However, we're targeting Jewellery stores and Banks & ATMs initially. Geographically speaking, we're open to having customers from around the globe as we're hardware and software invariant, but want a consolidated market cap in India first. Hence, our marketing campaigns are running in most of the (to-be) smart cities of India.


How much time did it take you from conceptualization of 'your venture' to actually launching it in the market ?

Research on StomatoBot has been going on for about 2.5 years now and we've launched recently.


How do you plan to market your product? What are your customer acquisition strategies ?

We've begun marketing our product online on social and search media. We also regularly get invites for interviews like this or to blog about ourselves. We believe ours is a hard product to market because it is very niche, new and has no proper analogous product in existence for the user/customer to compare to. So, we also have to take the effort and spend the time to educate our customers.

A quick demo does more than a lot of talking. Hence, we're offering a week's FREE Trial worth Rs. 1250 completely for our potential customers. We also offer anyone, just anyone, who recommends our product as an evangelist a referral cash reward commission and a discount to people who come via such evangelists. 

So, we're incentivizing word-of-mouth too. Please contact me on how to be our Product Evangelist.

Anyone, with fulfilling the pre-requisites and the interest may try our product by requesting the FREE Trial on:

https://StomatoBot.com/freetrial


What is the revenue model ?

Biannual or quarterly Subscription based Video Surveillance Alerts as a Service - VSAaaS on email, with a Freemium Mobile App.


What do you want to achieve from this? What is your larger goal or vision ?

We dream of a Pan-India Security Shield. A shield that's impenetrable, flexible, always vigilant, omniscient but not omnipotent keeping in mind people's right to privacy. A national grid of public and private CCTV cameras that works in unison to find patterns that were hitherto impossible to trace and predict in the proverbial haystack of data explosion. An India that is revered for its technological prowess in security software and feared by miscreants with our system as a potent deterrent. An India that is a research and technology hub of the world in advanced general AI, particularly in Computer Vision and Perception.


What sort of support and feedback are you looking from the community ?

Now, that people in the community have read till here, and I'm thankful for this, I would love to hear your thoughts on innovative ways to market & sell our product. I'm reachable on all social media.




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Jatin Chaudhary
Salesman @eChaiVentures l Good at managing WhatsApp groups n organizing high quality, large gatherings at low cost :-) l Observer l Fmr Global Shaper @WEF

@Anand - Which are your major Sales challenges?

anand muglikar
CEO & Gardener @StomatoBot1 - Your WatchMan who never sleeps! Entrepreneur in Computer Vision AI ML Deep Learning | Try-Grit-Stoic

@Jatin Right now the biggest challenge is how to market this kind of a completely new & innovative product. Most people don't know or cannot believe this exists. This is not a conventional product such that it has an analogous old product existing, say just like Lifebuoy, we've made this new soap. There's no such comparative product for our product. So, we have to educate potential customers on how this product works and how it benefits them. Plus, we cannot Not use the keyword 'CCTV' in our advertising as our product needs pre-installed CCTV system to function. But due to having the keyword 'CCTV' in our ads, we're getting a lot of false leads from people who want to buy CCTV systems/cameras. So, it's a tricky situation we're in in our marketing right now. Besides, young startups are always in need of funding until luck favors and we get exposed to some awesome Angel investor or we have a steady income from paying customers.

Aravind Neelagiri

Hi I’m cofounder of fixitpro services we can provide installation and maintenance of cctv if possible let’s collaborate .we will do all the maintenance and installation you can offer a package including cctv’s along with your software why to lose customers . We will support your business by providing installation and maintenance.

Prem Nathwani
Computer Engineer by degree and a salesman by heart. On a constant endeavour of learning the advantage of new tech and make it available for masses through product design.

Particularly will it complement the government surveillance plans?

anand muglikar
CEO & Gardener @StomatoBot1 - Your WatchMan who never sleeps! Entrepreneur in Computer Vision AI ML Deep Learning | Try-Grit-Stoic

@Prem Indian Govt has surveillance systems like the NatGrid, DRDO Netra and all for telecommunications, phone, email and social media tapping and interception. It even has recently got a nod to access financial transactions data of suspected individuals. However, in India we do Not have a pan-India security shield for CCTV Surveillance automation. We at StomatoBot would like to propose and be part of such a pan-India Centralized monitoring system, whenever that happens in India.

More details here:
https://stomatobot.com/pan-india-security/

Until then, we're doing our work well to get noticed.

Hanuj Tilwani
Founder's Office at DemandFarm | Ex-Founder at Miho (B2B SaaS)

How do you plan to scale this up?

anand muglikar
CEO & Gardener @StomatoBot1 - Your WatchMan who never sleeps! Entrepreneur in Computer Vision AI ML Deep Learning | Try-Grit-Stoic

Although not everything goes as per plan in entrepreneurship, but having no plans is risky as well as foolhardy. So, my plan is to give trial to as many potential customers as possible and leave the rest to how they experience the product and how it solves their problem. Rest I'm hopeful will work out by them telling more people.

Nikunj Verma
Cofounder at CutShort, an AI based platform to find jobs, hire or connect with other professionals.

Very interesting product. Anand's passion and energy for this idea is inspiring too!

anand muglikar
CEO & Gardener @StomatoBot1 - Your WatchMan who never sleeps! Entrepreneur in Computer Vision AI ML Deep Learning | Try-Grit-Stoic

Thank you @Nikunj! :) That's what keeps us from drowning, isn't it? What Cutshort has done with Voila is awesome too!

Dhruv Gupta
A researcher turned entrepreneur, a computer scientist by certificate and a design thinker by training who did his first startup at 18. He has built 3 (three) tech startups till now and has been part of the journey for many startups as consultant, mentor and investor.

@Anand - I too work in domain of Computer Vision and Image processing, and had felt a huge scarcity of human resource available in this domain. From your team, it is quite visible that you alone with a bunch of "interns" are taking care of the core technology development.

I would like to know your strategies for making a good team for future of StomatoBot.

anand muglikar
CEO & Gardener @StomatoBot1 - Your WatchMan who never sleeps! Entrepreneur in Computer Vision AI ML Deep Learning | Try-Grit-Stoic

I know we don't have readymade talent for us, so we groom them as interns / coached students first. If they stay back, it's a bonus as long as they do.

Vishwas Joshi
Jedi Knight working on building Disruptive Technology.

Hi, can we discuss on your future plans?

anand muglikar
CEO & Gardener @StomatoBot1 - Your WatchMan who never sleeps! Entrepreneur in Computer Vision AI ML Deep Learning | Try-Grit-Stoic

Yes sure @Vishwas. Please ask any question you might have. And sorry i got too busy since this afternoon until now. Just got free and called you up, but you seem busy now.