Umakant Soni

We are building a Humanity centric AI city to create a safe and trustworthy AI ecosystem for the world from India 🇮🇳. This city will host cognitive, digital and physical infrastructure for 25000 AI researchers and AI builders along with their agents and enabling robots, tagged to their digitized human identities. This will create a safe “Universal Basic Intelligence” at city scale and potentially a unique model for India 🇮🇳 to adopt AI revolution in a way that will create impact for all. This city is going to be a digital physical city and will also create consented data at city scale for world models. We believe that general intelligence stack will consist of LLMs (for languages & creative reasoning)+ Neurosymbolic (for narrow vertical applications) + World Models (for grounding AI in real world).

ARTPARK (AI & Robotics Technology park) is the result of $0.5bn (3660 Cr) investment by govt of India to create AI & Robotics research and innovation ecosystem. ARTPARK is a section 8 (not for profit) company promoted by IISc and supported by AI Foundry to bring academia, industry and govt together in a triple helix to create leapfrog innovations to increase access to a better quality of life for billions by leveraging the powerful AI & Robotics revolution. By creating a powerful research translation engine, we aimed to bring data, talent and research to large scale societal problems. 3 major areas of focus being digital and physical mobility, intelligent and accessible digital healthcare for everyone & learning for AI age.

Over the past few years, Artificial intelligence has been put to use in revolutionizing the lives of more than a billion people living in developed markets. But, what about the 6bn people living in the developing world? They have unique problems and thus require unique solutions, which may not be built out of traditional AI clusters of Silicon Valley or elsewhere. India is the "supermarket" of unique problems and coupled with data diversity and talent, could power the next big AI cluster to push AI to work for 6bn people who are living in developing markets. Solutions could be found by putting together capital, resources, talent, and an "idea to impact" eco-system to accelerate AI innovation for the developing world. We incubated KarmaLife (www.KarmaLife.ai), India’s largest AI driven financial platform for gig workers. We also have created together with IISc, ARTPARK ( Www.Artpark.in) AI & Robotics Technology Park, seed funded by Govt of India to impact 1bn people with AI by 2030.

pi Ventures is a $31M (225 CR) early stage venture fund investing in cutting edge ideas in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Internet of Things out of India. I co-founded the fund along with Manish Singhal and raised money, served as GP and member of the investment committee. Our current portfolio companies includes Sigtuple (www.sigtuple.com), Zenatix/exited now(www.zenatix.com), Niramai (www.niramai.com), Ten3T Health (www.ten3Thealth.com), Locus (www.locus.sh) & CustomerSuccessBox (www.customersuccessbox.com), Oweme (https://www.oweme.co.uk/), Frontdesk.ai, Wysa.io, Pixis.ai and others.

At Science India, helped in growing Springrole (AI driven recruitment platform) and Simply (Intelligent recharge app for pre paid users) . He helped with hands on product management , team and maturing idea to product market fit with Science methodology. He also explored setting up Science India fund to find new ideas to grow and also to localise success like "Wishbone".

Helped create the digital strategy focused on Internet of Things and in M&A negotiation for LUNAR. LUNAR is a 30 year old, award winning global design pioneer, who brought design to valley with customers like CISCO, HP, APPLE, J&J and others.

Vimagino started with the vision of tomorrow, where we would be helped by intelligent systems which will learn what we do and will guide us online or offline. One of the first companies in India to build Intelligent AI BOTs for customer support in 2009-10. Based on realtime sentiment feedback, BOTs transfer the chat to human agents seamlessly.

Helping build next generation of social learning networks for human to human learning, using AI and semantics. Remodeling the organization to take advantage of the strategic shift in the learning domain, using the principle that learning of tomorrow is going to be embedded in the environment. Building vision, building a world class team and raising money to move towards this goal.

From Idea to implementation of saas based strategic game changer offering of providing business process outsourcing on demand. From conceptualizing the core idea, to getting it wetted with customers, analysts, internal stakeholders, to geting it funded, staffed, launched, GTM, priced and landing the first three customers. All within one year. Its been a fun experience of cutting edge technology combined with business model innovation. At the same time, its been very tough, innovating at all levels, from concept innovation, to pricing innovation to delivery innovation and driving it through the inertia of a big organization.

I am designing and helping in the execution of strategy for Wipro in the evolving new technology domains, like SOA, SaaS. My multidisplinary approach helps in looking at the problems with different perspectives and youth allows me to think afresh and not be worried about mistakes.