By: Utpal Chakraborty, Lead Architect

The world of technology is moving at a rapid pace. A decade ago, it was not so easy to start a new IT company. A new company required a huge amount of initial investment to setup. It was not so easy for startups to develop their ideas and bring them into the world without a huge investment. The technology market has rapidly changed within a decade. In last 5 years’ hardware & infrastructure cost have gone down in the market. With the invention of Cloud computing, there is no need to invest on infrastructure as everything can be processed and stored on the internet.

The softwares are now open source, and are readily available everywhere. The market is getting more focused on artificial intelligence and cognitive computing. The cost for making softwares based on artificial intelligence, is getting cheaper and the software solutions are readily available in shorter amount of time due to adoption of rapid development methodologies. And with the huge flexibilities provided by all Cloud providers, things have now become much cheaper and easier.

As artificial intelligence is on the rise in the market, the customers have always high expectations from those products that are based on AI. Although artificial intelligence offers a variety of solutions, most of the times they are unable to serve every aspect of a complete business requirement. So, many of the IT service companies have taken a strategy to pick and choose best-of-the-breed available AI solutions, and build custom solutions combining those to serve a larger business use case. Otherwise, this is not possible with a single available solution.
With efficient software being developed everywhere, startup companies are challenging the tech giants. Startups are young and have young blood in them. They encourage innovative minds to bring out new ideas in the world. Startups provide flexibilities to its employees to do R&D, and come up with innovative solutions which creates buzz in the IT industry.

Startup follow a lean culture where thing happen fast. Startups don’t go with unnecessary processes, which make things slower and can throw them out of the race. Startups realized very well that only the innovative solutions which will create buzz in the industry, is going be the differentiator for them. On the other hand, big giants follow a code and they want to target things that are huge in numbers. Startup companies follow a different procedure compared to IT giants.

Companies like Microsoft, IBM or Google, or many other companies that are big giants, are now really competing with the startups in the AI space, than competing among themselves. This used to be the case for Non-AI areas earlier. Big IT companies always face a problem against startups, because of their lucrative business model. They don’t want to compromise their highly profitable business as they don’t want to bring such a change in the market, which many go against with regards to their long term business goal. But the startups are always looking to push new idea in the market through which they are going to get noticed.

Although the startups have limited funds and resources, they have effectively used their Artificial intelligence Intellectual Property & Innovation, and this has started a battle between the big giants and the startups. Companies related to Artificial intelligence raised a lot of funding. In 2015, the funding was raised by up to $1.2billion.
Here are some of the famous latest startups that are competing with IT giants.

1: Darktrace
This is security startup from Cambridge, started by few graduates. This software uses machine learning algorithms to detect cybercrime and catch cyber criminals. They have raised $825 million for their startup.

2: Benevolent AI
This is startup founded in 2013 that is focused on Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Their product can easily interrogate the data by using propriety algorithms, and provide meaningful insights in the field of health and drug development. This is one of the best funded AI startups, as they have managed to get $72 million for their investment.

3: Diffblue
Diffblue have designed an AI software to test and spot bugs in a software. In other words, they have designed a program that designs or improves other computer programs. They have raised $22 million for their startup.

To stay consistent in the market, big giants are now buying up the startups with their money power realizing the fact that products offered by many of the startups are really superior and innovative. Tech giants Apple, Microsoft and Google are spending a lot of money to buy startups.

Google has purchased Deep Mind startup for a record fee of $400 million. Microsoft has bought SwiftKey, while Apple has bought Vocal IQ.

Artificial intelligence is now playing a big role for startups in the market to compete against the big tech firms. With this trend, many brilliant scholars from the field of Artificial Intelligence, from different premier technological institutes and universities, have started creating their own startups and their far superior AI products.

Small to big IT Service companies are also in the race of Artificial Intelligence, they are trying to push Artificial Intelligence as a software service, as a differentiator, and value-add to their clients. Each of these compaies are claiming that they have got their out-of-the-box AI solutions, which could prove to be a game changer for their customers in different sectors they are serving.

But to keep pace with this big competition in the AI market, any company small or big, startup or age old, “out of the box” IPs and solutions are going to play a crucial role. Innovation will be the key differentiator here unlike all conventional methods, which used to have worked well in the past.