In Conversation with Arun and Dinesh, Co-founders, Yottaasys
Arun is serial entrepreneur with a passion for technology and challenges.
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Updated November 2026. This was first published on 21 November 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count. This is a record of a conversation from that day. No new quotes were added.
Key takeaways
- Arun is serial entrepreneur with a passion for technology and challenges.
- Arun has authored books, participated in patents, and won several industry/startup awards.
- Along with his work, he loves to play badminton, tennis, swim and do yoga.
Arun is serial entrepreneur with a passion for technology and challenges. Arun has authored books, participated in patents, and won several industry/startup awards. Along with his work, he loves to play badminton, tennis, swim and do yoga.
Dinesh is a multifaceted serial entrepreneur with a passion for sales and marketing. Dinesh has co-authored books and participated in patents, Dinesh currently is discovering computer vision at scale by reducing latency while maintaining high accuracy and helping businesses to solve two of their most complex problems: Retaining Happy Employees and Finding Customers for their New Products.
1. Can you share with us the story of your journey? How did you guys come up with the idea #
Arun and Dinesh: The name Yottaasys comes from Yottabyte, the largest amount of data on the bit scale; as we were always focused on computing and providing insights, the name perfectly resounded with our target. The seed of Yottaasys was planted during our COE experience. as part of the COE leadership team, we were researching the upcoming technologies and their impact on our ways of working and living. We have been working in the data science and business intelligence space all our lives. during the COE experience, we saw the value addition and automation AI would bring to the table. We realized that AI is the new frontier and is going to change the way we do things. this was further accelerated by a challenge thrown by one of our respected mentors to create a world-class AI product company from India; slowly but eventually, we took the challenge. When we started, we wanted to create a setup that is exciting, meaningful, flexible, and focused (almost meditative in nature workwise) and hence Yottaasys.
2. Start-ups face a lot of challenges before they become successful. What are some of the #
Arun and Dinesh:** Our top three challenges were access to capital, ramping up a world-class deep tech team, and customer education.
Access to Capital:** Until a few years back, it was hard to get funded as an AI product start-up; it took great efforts to convince investors about the possibility of a successful AI product start-up from India. Only when we moved over to the US and other geographies did access to capital became less of a problem.
Hiring:**Our second biggest challenge was hiring deep tech team members, especially in the full stack and data science area. Captives and unicorns were throwing in money like anything (it has only further accelerated now), and we did not have a deep pocket to attract the best team members. Though it is still an open challenge, we have partially mitigated this problem by ramping freshers or 1-2 years experienced members and bringing in only a few highly experienced team members and empowering them with ownership.
Customer Education:** The third challenge was customer education, first explaining AI to B2B customers then convincing them the value addition AI can bring to their businesses; it took a lot of our time during the early days. Only after 2020, our customers were ready to take the AI journey, and now it is happening so rapidly that we are finding it hard to keep pace with our pipelines.
3. Facial recognition is one of the driving forces of the fourth industrial revolution. Ca #
Arun and Dinesh:** Talent retention in this global digital age is an equation that includes managing both productivity and employee happiness. This is where we see 3I playing a significant role in capturing Employee Micro Expressions and identifying Emotion Behaviour Patterns. The next big part we see 3I playing is improving customer experience, especially helping companies understand customer preferences better prior to a new product/service or a new variant of an existing product/service.
4. The company’s products already cater to various domains including the Banking, manufact #
Arun and Dinesh:** Yottaasys is taking a totally disruptive approach. Rather than sector wise, we are taking a function-based approach.
- Enhancing Employee Experience & 2. Enhancing Customer Experience.
5. Why did Yottaasys choose to address this industry problem of increasing Employee & Cust #
Arun and Dinesh:** Yottaasys, as a philosophy, has always believed that ‘Disruption is the key to deliver and impact the topline or bottom-line’.
As an company, we felt rather than a sector-based problem; we needed to address it as a function. By using two of the most prevalent issues in the market, we were able to solve problems across all sectors. This is where we are also creating value for the industry as a whole. While we are helping companies increase their bottom-line by keeping their employees happy, we are also impacting their topline by helping them understand their customer preferences.
6. How does companies use 3I to increase employee experience & customer experience? #
Arun and Dinesh:** Employee experience impacts the customer experience in more ways than one can realize. When companies focus on creating a culture and providing a great employee experience, it affects every aspect of the business, including the customer service that the employees deliver.
With the battle for top talent at an all-time high and people staying at jobs for shorter periods, recruiting the best and figuring out how to keep them around is a priority for HR and senior leaders for companies of all sizes. Also, finding prospects, turning them into customers, and keeping them happy and satisfied is what makes businesses grow and prosper. There is a connection between the two, i.e., happy and satisfied employees lead to happy and satisfied customers.
Yottaasys addresses this problem uniquely by providing AI-driven feedback loops and metrics on employee and customer engagement. We are grabbing every data element essential for the employee engagement area, be it data from the keyboard, mouse, browsing history, or visual data from the employee webcam. The data is captured in real-time and run through various deep learning and supervised models to get holistic metrics on employee engagement. Our automated data capture replaces the needs for surveys, discussions, and HR meetups. We capture emotions from the visual data in real-time along with the distractions. By combining these avatars of input data, we can derive Top C level matrices (such as the general motivation levels) and other operational matrices (such as which event, time and instance act as a factor in enhancing or decreasing employee engagement). Finally, we also provide APIs that can help integrate these data predictions with the traditional ERP, CRM, HRMS and obtain C-level summaries on employee and customer engagement.
7. According to reports at least 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day. It #
Arun and Dinesh: We would like to divide the answer into two sections for this question. these sections are current and future.
Current: Instead of focusing on the quantity of data, our focus is on the quality of data. we have a few of our mutually agreed customer sources that continuously feed data to us. Our modules, such as deep optimizer filters, enhance and select meaningful data, automatically label them, and then feed them to our models. So instead of a brute force approach, we have a more efficient qualitative approach for handling data.
Future: We are working on something which is fundamentally very different. right now, the entire math behind AI is driven by the physical aspect of our mind/brain. Now our mind is multi-dimensional; there are many other aspects to the mind which are dimensionally different from the physical nature of the mind. These dimensions help us with what it can do such as intuition, imagination, creativity etc. Internally we call this domain CI (Conscious Intelligence). we are a work in progress in defining the fundamental math, logic, and models needed to support CI. This is one area for which we will need lots of capital, and we are working on it.
8. Can you suggest some of your favorite books on AI for our readers? #
Arun and Dinesh:**We would like to divide the books into two categories: foundation. is for future aspirants of AI, and progressive. is for the C-level executives who want to use AI for their business.
The Elements of Statistical Learning by Sir Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman.
Machine Learning Certification by Stanford University (Coursera).
Articles on Medium, especially by writers like Adam Geitgey, Jason Brownlee, and others.
Anything and Everything by Sir Jeremy Howard (Founder of fast AI and a true guru in all aspects).
Yottaasys AI Ramp up content (we will be releasing it as an open-source very soon).
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie 2. How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil 3. The Emotion Machine: Common-sense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind by Marvin Lee Minsky.
9. Finally, could you share some tips on leadership, start-up struggles, and maintaining a #
Arun and Dinesh:** We would say a strong understanding and bonding between the co-founder team is crucial. The core of any startup is the trust factor which can either break or make a company.
After this, we would say the other qualities for a successful startup will be.
Being Passionate and Resilient:** As both go a long way to sustain the constant challenges that one faces in a startup environment. Persevere:** It’s very important in a startup to move an extra mile and never give up. Transparent:** Extremely transparent and being candid about accepting mistakes.
- Small: We always believe in small teams for all our functional units. Too many people in anything creates lots of communication, dedication, and ownership challenges. - Simple: There is a lot of complexity in what we do on a day-to-day basis, so it’s our responsibility to create an execution plan which is extremely simple and logical. We truly believe in the saying, > > “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.” – Albert Einstein > - **Empowered:**We honestly believe in picking the best and empowering them to take risks and decisions related to executing those risks. We deeply emphasize the importance of leading from the front, which means the leadership team should code or do sales calls, especially when their respective teams are finding it challenging. - Short: Our conversations, meetings, emails are always short and very much to the point. Our experience has been that lot of times, meetings are actually corporate-sponsored pastimes and can be dangerously unproductive, so we have kept our meetings to a minimum. We follow meditative conversations, which means if you are not clear in your head about an item and cannot define it in 3 lines, don’t call in others for a meeting or conversation.
Questions and answers #
6. How does companies use 3I to increase employee experience & customer experience? #
Arun and Dinesh: Employee experience impacts the customer experience in more ways than one can realize. When companies focus on creating a culture and providing a great employee experience, it affects every aspect of the business, including the customer service that the employees deliver.
8. Can you suggest some of your favorite books on AI for our readers? #
Arun and Dinesh: We would like to divide the books into two categories: foundation. is for future aspirants of AI, and progressive.