“We can proudly say we are entirely a ‘made in Madras’ product,” says Ashwini Asokan, co-founder and CEO of the curiously-named Mad Street Den, a city-based start-up that works on the premise of redefining artificial intelligence (A.I.) and ‘computer vision’.

From Vellore

“But we do have one engineer from Vellore Institute of Technology,” Anand Chandrasekaran, co-founder of the company and Ashwini’s husband, corrects her.

“But Vellore is not all that far away. It is almost a part of Madras,” she laughs. Spirits are high at Mad Street Den’s office in Abhiramapuram.

Mad Street Den? “It is sadly not as interesting as you might think,” Ashwini intercepts. “MAD stands for Mind Abled Devices. We are into computer vision and artificial intelligence after all. Mad Street Den just had a good ring to it.”

The start-up was in the news last month for having received funding to the tune of US $1.5 million (roughly Rs. 9 crore) from two venture capital firms.

Anand is a neuroscientist, whose research was related to how the brain’s visual system wires itself up. He also has technical expertise in neuromorphic engineering — translating neural algorithms into hardware design. Before he came to Chennai, he was consulting on neuroscience and machine learning projects.He drives the creation of a computer vision platform that currently has five modules, and more are being planned.

Ashwini has worked for Intel in several roles and business groups and her expertise is in driving new product categories and experiences out of mobile technologies. She diligently drives the product and applications of the A.I. modules.

In one of the ‘proof of concept’ demonstrations the couple shows, the photo of a person’s shirt is captured by a smartphone, and it is shown how the A.I. engine can help an e-commerce website show search results of shirts that have similar colours or patterns.

Ashwini and Anand’s vision for the company takes it beyond just specialising in one or two specific A.I. components.

They want to build an entire stack of computer vision-related A.I. on the cloud that will help their company work in the B2B space as an A.I. service provider.

Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran aim to build an entire stack of computer vision-related AI on the cloud —Photo: V. Ganesan