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Artificial Intelligence

All Is Well, India’s first AI-enabled integrated fitness app for sports, Gets funded by Bharat Founders Fund and Marquee Angel Investors

To unlock the peak performance of sportspersons, All Is Well, first of its kind AI-enabled integrated fitness tech platform, raised $250k from Bharat Founders Fund and a group of prominent angel investors, including Shantanu Deshpande (Founder CEO Bombay Shaving Company), Abhishek Banerjee (Popular Bollywood Actor & Entrepreneur), Pradeep Parameswaran (RGM APAC Uber Mobility), Vijay Aggarwal (Ex-CTO BharatPe & Blinkit), Aarti Gill (Co-Founder Oziva), Sumit Jain (CEO Graphy and Co-Founder CommonFloor) and others.

All Is Well was started in October 2022 by IIT Roorkee alum Vaibhav Tandon (Ex-Leadership Team at OGQ, two-time entrepreneur) and Badminton icon Aparna Popat (Two-time Olympian and Arjuna Awardee). They saw a big gap in India where 4 million competitive and aspirational sportspersons underperform due to fitness issues, injuries, stress and their coaches not having access to sport-science expertise. The current fitness apps focus only on the health aspects (e.g. weight loss and sugar control), which are not the core requirements of these sportspersons.

To solve this massive problem, they have built All Is Well app that offers AI-driven actionable insights and access to world-class personalized physical, nutrition and mental training techniques that have been used by top cricketers and Olympic medalists. This will empower sportspersons of all levels to ‘Train like champions’.

Vaibhav Tandon, CEO of All Is Well, said “Access to these sport-specific and personalized training techniques was once exclusive to the elite sportspersons. Through our team, which has trained champions like P.V. Sindhu, Saina Nehwal, Shreyas Iyer and Surya Kumar Yadav, we are scaling this expertise to a larger user base including the recreational sports community. We have a holistic team of pedigreed tech, sports and business thought leaders to make a unique performance-focused app.”

The funds are being utilized to encompass new sports and to integrate wearable technology into its existing AI-based digital product, further elevating its capabilities. They will also file international patents for some of its IPs in the coming months including All Is Well Fitness Score (AFS) which is an intuitive, 3D fitness score, like a CIBIL score, for comparing and tracking overall sport-specific fitness.

Commenting on the funding, Maanav Saagar, Partner Bharat Founders Fund said “Vaibhav and Aparna come with the right experience to build AIW. We believe that technology would play a huge role in enabling sports talent to realize their true potential. AIW’s approach of partnering with sports academies and integrating technology at a grass-root level paves the right path for them to build a product that can be used at scale.”

The Advisory Panel of All Is Well consists of stellar leaders like Rahul Chaudhary (Co-founder Treebo), Vijay Aggarwal (Ex-CTO, BharatPe) and Manish Gupta (Ex-Moglix and Cashify). Speaking about the opportunity, Rahul Chaudhary said, “There are tremendous opportunities to create value in the sport and fitness space. There is a great inclination to integrate sports into our daily lifestyle not only for well-being but also to become better at it. While extending sports science support to the maximum number of competitive sportspersons is the need of the hour, it is also the right time to provide this expertise through tech to a wider market of sports enthusiasts.”

Since its inception, the app has marked huge traction, particularly in Cricket and Badminton. They have established partnerships with prestigious academies like the Gary Kirsten Cricket India centers and Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy and in fact, 14 players from the Indian badminton team are enjoying the benefits of the app.

by Team SNFYI

Facebook is testing a new feature that invites some users—mainly in the US and Canada—to let Meta AI access parts of their phone’s camera roll. This opt-in “cloud processing” option uploads recent photos and videos to Meta’s servers so the AI can offer personalized suggestions, such as creating collages, highlight reels, or themed memories like birthdays and graduations. It can also generate AI-based edits or restyles of those images. Meta says this is optional and assures users that the uploaded media won’t be used for advertising. However, to enable this, people must agree to let Meta analyze faces, objects, and metadata like time and location. Currently, the company claims these photos won’t be used to train its AI models—but they haven’t completely ruled that out for the future. Typically, only the last 30 days of photos get uploaded, though special or older images might stay on Meta’s servers longer for specific features. Users have the option to disable the feature anytime, which prompts Meta to delete the stored media after 30 days. Privacy experts are concerned that this expands Meta’s reach into private, unpublished images and could eventually feed future AI training. Unlike Google Photos, which explicitly states that user photos won’t train its AI, Meta hasn’t made that commitment yet. For now, this is still a test run for a limited group of people, but it highlights the tension between AI-powered personalization and the need to protect personal data.

by Team SNFYI

News Update Bymridul     |    March 14, 2024 Meesho, an online shopping platform based in Bengaluru, has announced its largest Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) buyback pool to date, totaling Rs 200 crore. This buyback initiative extends to both current and former employees, providing wealth creation opportunities for approximately 1,700 individuals. Ashish Kumar Singh, Meesho’s Chief Human Resources Officer, emphasized the company’s commitment to rewarding its teams, stating, “At Meesho, our employees are the driving force behind our success.” Singh further highlighted the company’s dedication to providing opportunities for wealth creation despite prevailing macroeconomic conditions. This marks the fourth wealth generation opportunity at Meesho, with the size of the buyback program increasing each year. In previous years, Meesho conducted buybacks worth over Rs 8.2 crore in February 2020, Rs 41.4 crore in November 2020, and Rs 45.5 crore in October 2021. Meesho’s profitability journey began in July 2023, making it the first horizontal Indian e-commerce company to achieve profitability. Despite turning profitable, Meesho continues to maintain positive cash flow and focuses on enhancing efficiencies across various cost items. The company’s revenue from operations for FY 2022-23 witnessed a remarkable growth of 77% over the previous year, amounting to Rs 5,735 crore. This growth can be attributed to Meesho’s leadership position as the most downloaded shopping app in India in both 2022 and 2023, increased transaction frequency among existing customers, and a diversified category mix. Additionally, Meesho’s focus on improving monetization through value-added seller services contributed to its revenue growth. Meesho also disclosed its audited performance for the first half of FY 2023-24, reporting consolidated revenues from operations of Rs 3,521 crore, marking a 37% year-over-year increase. The company achieved profitability in Q2 FY24, with a significant reduction in losses compared to the previous year. Furthermore, Meesho recorded impressive app download numbers, reaching 145 million downloads in India in 2023 and surpassing 500 million downloads in H1 FY 2023-24. Follow Startup Story Source link

by Team SNFYI

You might’ve heard of Grok, X’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s a chatbot, and, in that sense, behaves as as you’d expect — answering questions about current events, pop culture and so on. But unlike other chatbots, Grok has “a bit of wit,” as X owner Elon Musk puts it, and “a rebellious streak.” Long story short, Grok is willing to speak to topics that are usually off limits to other chatbots, like polarizing political theories and conspiracies. And it’ll use less-than-polite language while doing so — for example, responding to the question “When is it appropriate to listen to Christmas music?” with “Whenever the hell you want.” But Grok’s ostensible biggest selling point is its ability to access real-time X data — an ability no other chatbots have, thanks to X’s decision to gatekeep that data. Ask it “What’s happening in AI today?” and Grok will piece together a response from very recent headlines, while ChatGPT, by contrast, will provide only vague answers that reflect the limits of its training data (and filters on its web access). Earlier this week, Musk pledged that he would open source Grok, without revealing precisely what that meant. So, you’re probably wondering: How does Grok work? What can it do? And how can I access it? You’ve come to the right place. We’ve put together this handy guide to help explain all things Grok. We’ll keep it up to date as Grok changes and evolves. How does Grok work? Grok is the invention of xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup — a startup reportedly in the process of raising billions in venture capital. (Developing AI’s expensive.) Underpinning Grok is a generative AI model called Grok-1, developed over the course of months on a cluster of “tens of thousands” of GPUs (according to an xAI blog post). To train it, xAI sourced data both from the web (dated up to Q3 2023) and feedback from human assistants that xAI refers to as “AI tutors.” On popular benchmarks, Grok-1 is about as capable as Meta’s open source Llama 2 chatbot model and surpasses OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, xAI claims. Image Credits: xAI Human-guided feedback, or reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), is the way most AI-powered chatbots are fine-tuned these days. RLHF involves training a generative model, then gathering additional information to train a “reward” model and fine-tuning the generative model with the reward model via reinforcement learning. RLHF is quite good at “teaching” models to follow instructions — but not perfect. Like other models, Grok is prone to hallucinating, sometimes offering misinformation and false timelines when asked about news. And these can be severe — like wrongly claiming that the Israel–Palestine conflict reached a ceasefire when it hadn’t. For questions that stretch beyond its knowledge base, Grok leverages “real-time access” to info on X (and from Tesla, according to Bloomberg). And, similar to ChatGPT, the model has internet browsing capabilities, enabling it to search the web for up-to-date information about topics. Musk has promised improvements with the …