Tationem, a startup in the area of Data Science, based in Bangalore was the brainchild of Vijaykant Naladur (30), Aravind K (30) and Sendhil Kumar (29). The trio, who were classmates during graduation went separate ways and regrouped after each of their varied stints at varied jobs.
The three of them had studied together at M Visvesvaraya Institute of Technology, Bangalore. While Vijay then went to the University of Kentucky for his Master’s, Aravind worked as a Security Analyst at HP for seven years while Sendhil was a Presales Account Manager with Dell. Vijay, who after working at Alcatel-Lucent in Chennai for two years, spent five years as a Research and Teaching Assistant in foreign varsitites. He returned to India this year, which was met with a lot of resistance at home. Undeterred, he got in touch with his former college mates and convinced them to start Tationem with him in May 2014.
Meaning new direction in Latin, Tationem provides interdisciplinary training and consulting in advanced Computer Science topics such as data mining, machine learning, statistical model, algorithms and network security. Aravind says, “Data Science is not a very well understood area; we started training mainly to address this gap. We mine out insights in seconds thereby reducing cost and saving time for our clients”.
Tationem also developed a product called TexSIE (Textual Sentiment Interpretation Engine). The backbone of TexSIE is SentiRank, the proprietary algorithm to carry out sentiment analysis. It understands whether the content is positive or negative. Their first client was a US-based company, for whom they built a system to aid their education software classify the given text as simple or difficult to read based on the age group of the readers. Additionally, it could even replace complex words if the reader wanted to reduce the complexity level. For another client that promotes hotel listing for the backpacking crowd, Tationem built a system for extracting reviews of their listing from TripAdvisor.com, such that only the positive reviews in a specified time period are integrated on their respective websites while the negative ones are reported to the business owners. In fact, the system can process 1,000 reviews in 30 seconds, report the sentiment and keywords that are vital for the business’ decision making process.
The company is also gearing towards more of Subjective Sentiment Analysis development. In their Software as a Service (SaaS)-based model (a consumer can subscribe to license a software service for a specific period of time), the products are available at Enterprise-level and Basic-level. Tationem, which was built in a matter of four months, offers workshops on behalf of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a professional association based in New York, and has also set up a Data Science lab at MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore, for its faculty and students. Expecting to break even by March 2015, Tationem also plans to increase its revenues by licensing its IP to large companies once they get the patent.
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