Ram Ganesan is a serial entrepreneur who believes in fundamental innovation to help users at scale and affordable prices. He has acquired customers worldwide, including some of the top 500 retailers, and raised funds from institutional and angel investors. 

Ram is an Alchemist Accelerator Alumni and App4India winner, with three patents in NLP and mobile tech.

INDIAai interviewed Ram Ganesan to get his perspective on AI.

What inspired you to start Sivi, and what is the story behind the name?

Before Sivi, I built two products and acquired customers from across the globe, including some Fortune 500 companies. Through this experience, we realized that small businesses cannot afford quality designs, and the creative teams of large companies cannot match the content velocity for their campaigns. So, we started Sivi to democratize design and make it available for 200 million businesses worldwide.

We built Sivi based on atomic design principles. It is said that within the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva lies the blueprint of nuclear structure—the very essence of existence. The name 'Sivi' was chosen with feminine grace for this powerful universal principle. It is also the name of a beloved family member.

What is your vision for the future of Sivi and the generative graphic design tool?

In the early 2000s, Adobe disrupted the design industry with design tools. Ten years ago, Canva did that with a template tool. Now, Sivi is disrupting the design industry with generative AI.

We envision a future where design is easily accessible to anyone with an idea. Sivi aims to empower that creativity.

What unique value does Sivi bring to the market compared to other graphic design tools?

Template-based design tools like Canva and Microsoft Designer focus on template search rather than tackling the broader challenge of design generation for a given content. Template-replaced designs need to be more cohesive and relevant.

Image generators like Midjourney and DALLE produce monolithic images; they do not support vector graphics.

LLMs/LMMs excel in text-based tasks but need a more aesthetic understanding of graphic design.

Sivi is composed like a human designer and generates multi-layered, customizable graphics for user-given content in 72+ languages, including many Indian languages.

What challenges have you faced in developing the tool, and how did you overcome them?

Abundant data exists online for text and images. However, the lack of structured data and the multifaceted and multi-layered nature of graphic design present challenges in solving graphic design through generative AI. To overcome this challenge,

• We created and curated our structured dataset for graphic design.
• We have broken it down into multiple minor problems and created an ensemble of models instead of a single black box approach.

What market opportunities do you see in the future for generative graphic design?

• Hyper-personalization: Adapting designs automatically for individuals, their preferences, and contexts.
• Marketing Automation: We are accelerating content creation for campaigns across multiple channels. We are integrating ad platforms to generate designs at the speed of thought.
• E-commerce: Generating product banners tailored to different platforms and styles.

Can you tell us more about your team? What qualities do you look for in your team members?

We have a unique blend of designers, data scientists, and engineers to solve this problem.

We look for the following in our team members:

• Perseverance and fearless progress
• Passion for making design more accessible
• Agility and willingness to innovate
• Collaborative approach

What advice do you have for someone looking to start their AI startup?

We started our research in 2019 when generative AI was unknown to many. We recognised a widespread pain point among our customers, and that insight spurred us to find a solution. Identifying a real-world problem is the essential first step.

AI models may come and go, but datasets remain much longer. Find the right ways to access or generate unique datasets.

What qualities do you believe are essential for a successful entrepreneur?

A clear vision to create substantial value for the end-user, communicating the vision to employees, investors, and stakeholders, being persistent, and adapting to changes and challenges.

Image source: Sivi AI