A new trend is emerging in the generative AI space. Small and midsized IT firms are following the acquisition route to strengthen their capabilities, with data and analytics companies being the most common targets.
The most recent is LatentView Analytics, a digital analytics consulting and solutions firm based in Chennai, which acquired 70% of the outstanding equity in Decision Point for $39.1 million.
Established in 2012, Decision Point boasts a workforce of over 300 employees worldwide and specialises in RGM, Demand Forecasting, Pricing Analytics, Promotion Analytics, Retail Segmentation, and Marketing Mix Models, particularly focusing on Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands.
“GenAI will play a pivotal role in driving RGM strategies, and with this acquisition, LatentView is poised to provide enhanced technology and data analytics solutions to add value to clients,” said Rajan Sethuraman, CEO of LatentView Analytics, in an exclusive interview with AIM.
Similarly, Happiest Minds recently acquired US-based Aureus Tech Systems for $8.4 million, and Infosys acquired InSemi, a Bengaluru-based semiconductor design and embedded services provider, for $37 million.
LatentView’s Focus is on GenAI
Decision Point has developed BeagleGPT, a generative AI tool designed to help organisations gain valuable insights from their data with ease. This conversational analytics tool functions as a data and analytics co-pilot integrated with Microsoft Teams, making it accessible to users at all levels of an organisation.
On the other hand, LatentView has also developed its own generative AI tool, LASER, which can search and find information across all workplace apps in seconds. Additionally, the company offers another product called AI Penpal, which helps create highly personalised marketing email content and campaigns.
“The addition for us is BeagleGPT, the generative AI tool from Decision Point, which we are also taking to market,” said Sethuraman. “It is different in the sense that LASER focuses on unstructured data, whereas BeagleGPT focuses on structured data. This complementary nature is beneficial.”
He added that Decision Point has built a semantic layer which is very specific to the CPG space. The semantic layer does a lot of the interpretation first before the tokens are passed to the LLM. “It cuts down on the query time itself since the semantic layer handles much of the interpretation. Secondly, it also reduces the cost of implementation because it reduces the number of tokens that need to be passed through LLMs,” said Sethuraman.
“We are signing up with a bank in Europe to help them use Gen-AI for generating analyst reports,” said Sethuraman. He added that in the latest quarter, they closed a $0.5 million deal using generative AI and secured another deal of a similar value with a large European auto manufacturer.
Moreover, the acquisition of the Decision Point is going to help LatentView expand its team in Latin America. “Decision Point has a business in Latin America, a market where we have not been active, and today, about 60% of their revenue comes from there,” said Sethuraman, adding that LatentView will help bring their capabilities into the US and European markets as well.
LatentView is Not Alone
Infosys has built Topaz, a set of services, solutions, and platforms using generative AI technologies. TCS, on the other hand, is currently developing AI and generative AI projects worth $900 million. It also recently unveiled TCS AI WisdomNext, a platform aggregating multiple GenAI services into a single interface.
Meanwhile, Accenture announced over $900 million in new bookings for generative AI, reaching a total of $2 billion fiscal year-to-date during its Q3 FY24 earnings report.
Speaking of its competitors like TCS, Infosys, and Accenture, Sethuraman said that he is not worried about them because they are not the ‘OpenAI’s of the world’ and they are not building the next generation of LLMs.
“The differentiation, therefore, will be more in terms of domain understanding and use-case-specific capabilities. That’s what we can bring to the table, and that’s where I think we will also focus on—building a number of capabilities individually,” he said.
Thrives on Partnerships
LatentView has also partnered with NVIDIA and has already begun using NVIDIA technology to further enhance its analytics solutions, particularly its GenAI-powered insights engine, InsightsIQ. The solution, powered by NVIDIA TensorRT LLM Inference service, harnesses the agility of NeMo Inferencing Microservices (NIM) to accelerate and simplify implementation and reduce manual configuration efforts.
“One of the things that they have been active on is building an AI tech stack, which is something more in the software space, in addition to the GPUs that they have been building,” said Rajan, adding that the NVIDIA team has been super helpful in terms of helping with technical and architecture inputs.
On the other hand, LatentView Analytics is also currently working with Microsoft. “We do a lot of work for Microsoft Azure Stack. In particular, we are having some very good conversations with Microsoft Fabric,” said Sethuraman.
“We are placing our bet on the Microsoft Azure and Fabric ecosystem, where we intend to significantly double down in the coming months,” said Sethuraman, noting that another partner gaining traction is Databricks.
What’s next?
Despite the tough macroeconomic situation, Sethuraman anticipates a 5% growth in revenue for the next quarter and projects a fiscal year growth of between 16% to 20% for the company this year.
“In terms of the overall geographical split of revenues, the US continues to be the dominant geography, contributing 95% of overall revenues. Europe contributed about 1.4% to the overall revenues. But we are seeing good traction in Europe,” he concluded.
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