7 Indian Women In AI Innovation You Must Know About

Every country is betting on AI and developing various products and solutions using disruptive technology. Not just Silicon Valley, India too has many innovative AI companies which promote diversity among the workforce. About a decade ago, the tech scene in India was different from now. Like the rest of the world, the tech community was dominated by men, and women, although capable and interested, were not given much notice and opportunities. 

With the Indian markets heading towards the positive, many Indian AI companies are improving their work culture to make it more women-friendly. If you’re a woman aspiring for a job in the AI field or looking to change jobs, here are some women-led AI companies in India.

Geetha Manjunath: Niramai Health Analytix 

Geetha Manjunath founded Nirimai Health Analytix, a Bangalore-based startup that addresses critical healthcare problems using automated solutions. Focussing on breast cancer, Niramai has developed a novel software-based medical device to detect breast cancer at a much earlier stage than traditional methods of self-examination. The core technology of the company’s solution has been developed using our patented machine learning algorithms for reliable and accurate detection of breast cancer. She has been listed among India’s top women achievers by Forbes in 2020.    

Niki Parmar: Essential AI

Pune's Niki Parmar, a self-taught coder, founded Essential AI to create tools that help businesses function more effectively and intelligently. The startup is backed by major industry players such as Google, Nvidia, and AMD. Parmar played a key role in co-authoring the paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' which established the groundwork for the Transformer mode -- a crucial component in revolutionary AI systems like ChatGPT.

Ashwini Asokan: Vue.ai 

Founded by Ashwini Asokan and her husband Dr. Anand Chandrasekaran, Vue.ai is the leading artificial intelligence in the retail industry with its Intelligence Retail Automation. Working under its parent company Mad Street Den, Vue.ai uses disruptive technologies to smooth-line things. With the help of image recognition and data science, the company procures product data from images and analyses it to allow retailers to make fast decisions.

Ankita Thakur: GeoIQ

Ankita Thakur co-founded GeoIQ, a startup that is changing the retail space with location intelligence and ML-led analysis. They provide solutions that allow businesses to tap into offline demand and expand faster with actionable consumer insights that effectively improve their bottomline. With the help of granular location data aligned to the business goals and consumer profiles, GeoIQ enables optimised site selection and unlocks predictive results for the right merch-mix, inventory management, sales forecast and more.

Nidhi: NEMA AI

Nidhi founded NEMA AI to use technology in detecting neurodivergence and utilising the results to provide ethical solutions to support and educate individuals. In a 2023 interaction with SheThePeople, Nidhi shared, "Our platform starts recommending teachers about how they can approach teaching all the students. So the AI is taking care of the content and decreasing the amount of manual work for the teachers, which in turn is making them more efficient."

Suriya Prabha K: YouCode Intelligence Solutions

Suriya Prabha K founded YouCode Intelligence Solutions, a platform that enables children across remote villages in Tamil Nadu to develop computational thinking and problem-solving foundation from a young age. The social enterprise creates consumable Artificial Intelligence learning content which is gamified, thus making it fun and interactive for children. Suriya Prabha is running a campaign called Artificial Intelligence for Kids ( AI4KIDS) to foster the tech skills of rural and small town students.

Kausambi Manjita: Mason

Co-founded with Barada Sahu, Mason is a platform is a no-code, plug-and-play solution to let e-commerce sellers have their D2C storefront and offer products online without requiring a large engineering team. The startup provides an upgrade to small and medium businesses so that they sell products online without middleman stores that levy a huge commission. Mason charges 1% of its customers’ total sales to offer its platform, compared to other ecommerce retail stores which charge at least 30% tax.