Neel Jadhav, Vice President – Marketing, Katonic AI
The Katonic generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform has been making waves across both small and large businesses. It is highly regarded for its simplicity and user-friendliness, enabling businesses to swiftly develop robust, enterprise-grade AI applications without the need for coding expertise. In an interview with tele.net, Neel Jadhav, vice president – marketing, Katonic AI, shares his views on India’s evolving AI ecosystem and the company’s initiatives and growth plans…
How has the AI landscape evolved in India? What role is Katonic AI playing in this?
The global AI landscape can be categorised into four distinct layers, each hosting a flurry of activity. The first layer comprises data labelling and data engineering companies. They collect, sanitise, label and streamline data, prepping it for use in training and fine-tuning models. The second layer includes vector database and knowledge graph companies, which ensure that data is stored in a format easily consumable by large language models (LLMs). The third layer is occupied by powerful AI companies and research and development centres that leverage substantial financial resources to build and fine-tune large language models. OpenAI (closed-source) and Llama from Meta (open-source) are prime examples. The fourth and final layer consists of companies that offer platforms to facilitate the application of the aforementioned building blocks. They create applications that end-users or organisations can utilise.
In India, most generative AI (GenAI) start-ups focus on the top layer, employing GenAI-based solutions to solve specific problems. Katonic AI stands apart from the crowd. We empower organisations across all four layers. With our platform, organisations can construct, deploy and monitor enterprise-grade GenAI applications, fine-tune their models and even create new ones from ground zero, all in a single location.
What are the key products offered by your company? What new solutions are you planning to launch?
The Katonic AI platform allows businesses to build their own GenAI and machine learning (ML) applications. Our GenAI platform is completely no-code, which means that even business users can build powerful apps with enterprise-grade security in minutes instead of months. Additionally, users have the freedom to choose from over 70 large foundational models. Katonic platforms run in a Kubernetes cluster and can be deployed anywhere, such as multicloud, on-premises or the edge.
We currently offer over 25 ready-to-use templates across application categories such as AI assistants, chatbots, extraction, summarisation, generation, semantic search and classification. We will be rolling out additional categories and templates for data analysis, content moderation, code assistance (co-pilots) and recommendation systems. We currently have more than 2,500 active users and over 20 enterprise customers actively using the platform.
What sets Katonic AI apart from other companies, and what is the overarching vision that you aim to realise?
An analogy that our founder likes to use is, “If GenAI is like the gold rush, then Katonic AI is like the shop selling the maps and digging tools.” In a nutshell, we enable businesses to build, deploy and monitor GenAI models quickly, cost-effectively and securely. From a differentiation point of view, we are completely infrastructure-agnostic. We offer flexibility and choice for organisations by being LLM-agnostic, letting organisations choose a model of their choice. In fact, we are probably the only organisation that lets you play around with over 100 open-source foundation models for free through Katonic Playground. Upon identifying an ideal LLM, we enable secure application development. Our prompt tuning feature streamlines model creation without the need for coding, allowing easy testing and conversion into a scalable application programming interface.
While many competitors focus on providing a specific solution, Katonic AI is an enabler for all organisations wanting to start or scale their GenAI journey, including GenAI start-ups in India.
What are your growth plans for the near future?
We started with a focus on Asia Pacific, given our presence in Australia, Singapore and India. However, in the short time since we launched the GenAI platform, we have had organic demand from the US, the UK, Europe and the Middle East, which has quickly translated into an active customer base. Given the success we have had in these regions, we are now actively expanding our team and focusing on them.
While these growth targets remain, our primary focus is on improving our platform. We have received intensive validation from both experts and enterprises on just how user-friendly, intuitive and powerful the Katonic platform is. We want to keep building and adding more features until we are the best AI platform in the world. We are confident that if we keep moving towards this goal, everything else will follow and fall in place.
