Absentia, a startup working on artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies, has today announced that it has raised ₹8 crore in its latest pre-Series A round of funding. The round saw participation from Exfinity Venture Partners; former Infosys executives V Balakrishnan and Mohandas Pai; Deepak Ghaisas; and Girish Paranjpe.
The newly infused capital will be used to build Norah AI, an artificial intelligence engine that can create interactive content for games with minimal human intervention.
Commenting on this, Absentia cofounder Shubham Mishra, said,
With Norah AI, we are aiming to become the world’s first auto content-generation company with a focus on the media and entertainment segment. Over the past few months, the team has been successful in monetising the platform in the area of virtual reality , augmented reality and image processing across select sectors.
The company was founded by Shubham Mishra in 2015. In the same year, the company managed to secure ₹1.2 crore in seed funding from a clutch of investors including Astarc Ventures and 50K Ventures.
Norah AI, a product from Absentia, can create a completely new set of interactive content for arcade games, casual games, puzzles, animations, and graphics. Behind the scenes, this interactive media engine platform consists of a vast neural network, which can be used by interactive content designers to create games, GIFs, and animations in a short time. Content creators can train the machine with a movie and Norah AI will automatically generate a high-end game by learning from the movie’s verse and the characters which inhabit it.
Virtual Reality is a potential multi-billion dollar market worldwide, and India is one of the emerging markets. Its applications span across sectors such as gaming, education, healthcare, real estate, architecture, online shopping, etc.
Absentia is targeting the global VR market that is predicted to cross 15 billion by 2018, according to a report by MarketsAndMarkets. The virtual reality (VR) technology market is expected to reach $15.89 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 63.18 percent over five years.
