What do you do when you live in Chennai, have heaps of #Yellove, but need to make sure RCB's fans love your app? That's exactly the curious position that the men behind Chennai-based AI start-up Roanuz found themselves in this IPL. App makers who've handled some of the most prominent user engagement platforms associated with the IPL, their cricket Application Programming Interface (API) has helped many brands like Zomato, BookMyShow and RCB run their campaigns.
Roanuz was born seven years ago out of the need for a sports-based AI tech driver in the country. " We’re the backbone for every sports related technology. There are a few companies that do this, but our thought process is very unique. I've always been interested in AI and wanted to focus on sports since it's the most challenging sector in AI," says Anto Binish Kaspar, Founder and CEO, Roanuz, who was formerly a solutions architect for a company in Sweden.
Having built a designated Cricket API, they found themselves in demand after how seamlessly it integrated over multiple platforms, "The challenge is understanding this concept. Most know we’re the solution, but they don’t know how to search for it, because this is a completely new platform. That’s the kind of challenge we’re facing now — to educate everybody about the kind of service we offer and the kind of benefit they can get," he explains.
RCB, whose season was nothing to write home about, wanted an app where their fans could interact with each other and with the players as well. That and pretty much anything cricket that a die-hard fan would want on Match Day. “RCB wanted their app to contain live scorecards, statistics and records of all their players and that’s where we came in,” he says.
With the advent of AI, the concept of pushing the envelope on what is possible in real-time has always been the key. Roanuz did something that was pretty impressive for Zomato, he explains, "They were building a game that revolved around prediction, where millions of people would predict what would happen in the game. It would’ve been impossible for someone in Zomato to manually verify the predictions so they needed a system to verify if the predictions were correct or not, and that’s where we came in."
They now plan on expanding their services into providing API for other sports including football." We’re really good in cricket and we have started experimenting in football so we’ll be adding more critical scores and we want to do the same in other sports," he adds.
