Not wanting to build one themselves, the duo decided to use Lightspeed POS, another Montreal company making waves in the tech space at the time.
In 2014, after some initial traction, JD and his co-founder Guillaume Jacquet realized many golf club owners wanted a point of sale (POS) system integrated into the Chronogolf platform. This spark led to Chronogolf, which came to market in 2013. No more manually reconciling club revenue with restaurant expenses or other issues like that. It was an interesting industry to disrupt.”īeing entrepreneurs on top of just golfers, this sparked an idea: a SaaS product that could help golf club owners manage their entire business on one platform. “Club owners had to deal with so much manually. “The industry was archaic from a tech perspective,” said JD. The trio, all being avid golfers, lamented how frustrating it must be to run a golf course: you have to deal with course memberships, restaurants, quick service food, sometimes a bar, and occasionally even a hotel to manage all in one mini-empire. Over wine with a semi-pro golfer, JD and his business partner got to talking about golf problems. Speaking with TechExit.io, JD reflected back on the story of how he turned down three other offers before selling to Lightspeed and what life has evolved to now that he’s officially on team Lightspeed. This kind of experience is one few founders go through - and even fewer enjoyed it enough to look back fondly. No longer the leader of his own company, he had become a managing director of a division within a much larger corporate machine. They raised a total of $2.45 billion last year.After selling his startup Chronogolf to Lightspeed, JD St. Indian AI start-ups have raised $583 million this year, as of June, according to data from Venture Intelligence. The buzz around generative AI among both consumers and businesses has helped related start-ups draw funding even as an uncertain economy saps investments for other companies. Peak XV's other AI investments include voice assistant firm AI Rudder, computer vision firm Mad Street Den and enterprise marketing platform Insider, according to its website. The investment is among the first from Peak XV Partners after rebranding from Sequoia Capital India and SEA following a split with its U.S.-based parent fund last month. Incubated at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and supported by a grant from Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, AI4Bharat is also working with payments agency National Payments Corp of India to develop systems for voice-based payments on feature phones. The funding will be used to train its models on more data, an expensive endeavor for AI ventures, and create conversational bots through partnerships with government agencies, the sources said.ĪI4Bharat, Peak XV and Lightspeed did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.
It unveiled in May a mobile assistant that aims to make information on government schemes accessible in multiple languages. Most seed rounds are usually up to $1 million to $2 million.ĪI4Bharat, which is also backed by the Indian government, has been developing AI models for speech recognition and translation. The larger-than-usual seed funding round underscores the growing interest in generative AI, after OpenAI's ChatGPT dazzled users with its ability to engage in human-like conversations.
(Reuters) - AI4Bharat, a start-up backed by Microsoft, is raising $12 million from venture capital firms Peak XV and Lightspeed Venture to develop artificial intelligence-powered chatbots for Indian languages, according to three people familiar with the matter.
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