Spire Becomes First Indian Company To Delve Deep Into Unstructured Data Analysis

After two decades of experience in B2B software products in large corporations such as Yahoo!, Oracle and SAP in North America and Europe, Saurabh Jain, founder and CEO of Spire Technologies moved to India around the end of 2005. "I was thinking of doing something on my own. India has not come up with a credible software product after i-flex (now Oracle Financial Services)," he said.

Jain's vision was to create a technology so fundamental that can bring operational efficiencies in businesses. Most of the analytics people talked about until now was based on structured data while the reality is 90 per cent of all enterprise data and 99 people of all enterprise 'people data' is textual, qualitative and unstructured.

This was where Spire Technologies and Solutions was born - with a mission to derive meaning out of unstructured text. For instance, in the area of human resource, the quantifiable data would include the number of candidates applied for a job, number of candidates interviewed, and finally the number of offers made. But, the industry was grappling with challenges such as understanding the number of relevant or quality candidates for a particular job, Jain explains.

Spire Technologies claims to be the first and the only Indian company to do such work at such scale. Jain says he has taken a taken a contrarian view by adopting an anti-NLP (Natural Language Processing) approach, which is traditionally considered key to understanding unstructured data. "We use algorithms learnt from humans," he said.

The company's flagship product Spire TalentSHIP is a web 4.0 cloud-based suite of five products catering to the HR industry. The software searches all relevant resumes in your database and maps them to a particular job description in decreasing order of relevance. "The search accuracy is about 96 per cent and mapping accuracy levels is about 79 per cent as of today which is higher than any other products in the market," said Jain. "Spire TalentSHIP delivers transformational results for HR users all of whom have experienced unprecedented and quantified HR outcomes, which simultaneously increase revenue while reducing costs."

The company started operations in 2008 and has so far raised a capital of about $15 million, including the latest one of $8 million in a Series A from Agnus Capital, a fund managed by Arun Kumar, promoter of Bengaluru-based pharmaceutical company Strides Arcolab.

Spire Technologies expects revenue growth of over 400 per cent year-on-year this year (2016-17) from 300 per cent last year. Currently, it is targeting the U.S. and India markets but it plans to expand to Europe and other markets in the next one year. Jain said the company will also look at going beyond the HR vertical to other areas such as matrimony, defence, and healthcare in the next fiscal.

Jain is happy about the adoption rate and is confident about the potential of this technology. "Ever since we have gone global, we have seen huge demand as this kind of technology is significantly transformational," he said.