Nitin Das and Rahul Saxena from IIT Delhi, and Abhishek Vinod Singh from IIT Kanpur - share the same vision to apply their expertise in an area where there is a real impact on the environment and that could ease the lives of people. Founded in 2019, AiDash combines satellite intelligence with the power of AI technologies to make an impact and disrupt the traditional methods used in the utility industries.  

AiDash builds products using cutting-edge technologies to help companies gear up their assets for wildfire risks, weather changes, and operate sustainably. The predictive/ capabilities of the products enable customers to save millions of dollars annually. To understand the mission behind AiDash, we got in a conversation with Nitin Das who is currently the Chief AI Officer & Co-founder at AiDash. Nitin comes with over 15 years of experience and prior to AiDash, he was building and leading AI-based solutions for retail, marketing, and media mix optimisation. 

Q. What are the solutions that AiDash provides to serve the needs of different industries?  

Nitin: AiDash solutions cater to a wide range of core industries with distributed assets, such as utility, energy, water & wastewater, construction, transport, and mining. Currently, we have four key solutions: 

• Intelligent Vegetation Management System (IVMS) primarily serves utility and oil and gas industries having large scale distributed assets by analysing and predicting vegetation growth at scale and helping create effective 0&M strategies for years ahead.  
• Intelligent Sustainability Management System (ISMS) helps organisations to measure, enhance, track, report and offset biodiversity, GHG emissions and other sustainability metrics for land, air and water.  
• Remote Monitoring & Survey System (RMSS) enables field workers and supervisors to remotely monitor and survey vegetation hazards, RoW encroachments, wildfire risks, and weather-related damages to assets. This solution serves as a dashboard to monitor and inspect assets from anywhere, reduce operational costs and gain complete visibility into geographically distributed assets. 
• Disaster & Disruption Management (DDMS) helps accelerate disaster responses, plan disaster recovery strategies in advance, survey, and discharge post-disaster management operations immediately. 

All our solutions use advanced AI and satellite analytics to predict and transform complex O&M activities for vegetation management, sustainability management, remote monitoring & survey, and disaster and disruptions management. 

Q. Can you share the details about your new platform - Intelligent Sustainability Management System (ISMS), launched beside UN COP26 in Glasgow?  

Nitin: Yes, we launched the Intelligent Sustainability Management System (ISMS) at UN COP26 in November 2021. ISMS is a satellite- and AI-powered solution, built to help organisations achieve their sustainability goals, including biodiversity net gain. This solution enables organisations to measure carbon emissions, plan environmental enhancements, and track and report progress across the land, air, and water.  

ISMS uses high-resolution satellite imagery and AI models to measure emissions and identify opportunities for environmental enhancements to move forward for net-zero carbon goals. This solution enables streamlined sustainability operations management and reporting through cloud-based web and mobile platforms. So, ISMS can have a huge impact on the environment considering that all nations are now moving towards sustainability and net-zero carbon goals.  

Q. Mention some of the challenges for collecting high-resolution multispectral and synthetic aperture (SAR) data, required for AI models to work?  

Nitin: There are several challenges in collecting and processing high resolution multispectral and SAR data: 

• Cost: High-resolution satellite data is expensive. The cost of this data is dependent on the area of interest (AOI) and we need to be wise when selecting the AOI. This was a challenge considering we needed a lot of this data and to overcome this challenge we built a proprietary AI/ML algorithm. This algorithm chooses AOI optimally and helps reduce the cost of acquisition cost and size of data. 
• Coverage: A satellite provider may not have coverage of data across all locations and hence, we need to acquire data from multiple providers. To use all this data effectively, we must then fuse it together, which can be challenging. So, we built another AI/ML algorithm that fuses data from multiple satellite vendors optimally and increases the availability of data from all locations always. This significantly decreases the chances of non-availability of satellite data for any AOI. 
• Data size: High resolution multispectral and SAR data contain lots of information. This makes these datasets very large in size and it needs a robust system to process the data on the scale. Again, to control this, we have built a highly scalable and efficient processing system that can process a large number of geospatial datasets within a considerably lesser time frame. This process also enables to train and deploy AI models in a scalable manner. 

So, there are challenges considering that it is a niche technology, but we are overcoming it. 

Q. How well is the Indian market placed when it comes to effective utilisation of satellite intelligence?  

Nitin: In the last few years, many companies have started utilizing AI and satellite intelligence to cater to different industries. And the Indian market seems to be adopting these technologies well: 

• The agricultural industry has been using satellite intelligence for health tracking and yield monitoring of crops which can help farmers to increase agricultural productivity and income.  
• Financial institutions have started using satellite analytics to access the creditworthiness of farmers by measuring an array of parameters related to land, irrigation, and crop patterns and making lending decisions to farmers. 

We also see an increase in the use of satellite intelligence in areas of urban & infrastructure developments, water resource management, and climatic studies. 

Q. What according to you are the three key areas in India where AiDash solutions can be effective?  

Nitin: The Indian market offers huge potential for the adoption of satellite and AI-based technologies. Three key areas in India that can benefit from the AiDash offerings are Vegetation Management, Disaster management, and Sustainability. 

• Vegetation Management: IVMS can be used by government and private utility companies for effective vegetation management along with distribution and transmission networks. The solution can also be used to identify encroachments around railway tracks, oil and gas pipelines, and reduce O&M costs involved. 
• Disaster Management: DDMS can help with post-disaster management activities. Aerial surveys post disasters can be very time consuming and sometimes it is difficult to cover most areas, which can further slow down relief operations. So, DDMS helps to identify worst-hit areas and plan and prioritize relief work. 
• Sustainability Management: With India pledging to achieve net-zero carbon emission by 2070, ISMS is an effective solution that can measure and track net-zero goals, track current emission baselines and help our industries strategize and achieve net-zero goals. 

Q. Can you share funding and future plans for the company, especially in India?  

Nitin: AiDash is currently growing at a fast pace, and we have secured $33M in funding over 2 rounds from G2 Venture Partners, BGV, and National Grid Partners. We have over 30 customers globally, including Fortune 500 companies and have offices across USA, India, and recently opened our office in the UK as well. 

We are on a mission to make industries more sustainable and resilient and solve interesting challenges at the intersection of satellites, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and geospatial analytics. AiDash has a world-class team of seasoned professionals and alumni from leading campuses. In India, we have offices in Bengaluru and Gurugram. Currently, we are expanding and investing significantly in hiring great talent across our Engineering, Product, and Data Science teams. Since our core focus is on AI/ML, some interesting roles to highlight would be Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, and Remote Sensing Scientists. AiDash plans to double its employee strength in 2022 with a primary focus in India. 

Image from AiDash