Founded in 2014, Swiggy started small, delivering food to a few neighborhoods in Bengaluru, India. As the company grew, the team wanted a mapping technology that could help expand the service throughout India.

Swiggy needed a scalable mapping platform that covered a wide geographic area and offered tools to help the company to build an efficient mobile app and website for customers and delivery staff.

Customers find restaurants and order from them using the Android app, iOS app, or the website. Swiggy worked with Google Maps Partner Media Agility and used a variety of Google Maps Platform APIs to develop web and mobile apps that incorporate relevant local restaurant details.

Google Maps Platform Results

• Built a hyper-local delivery service that is growing throughout India at a rate of 25 percent per month
• Deliveries are made quickly, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and retention—users have been so satisfied that nearly 80 percent of its orders are from repeat customers
• Drivers seamlessly handle tens of thousands of orders per day

In order to guarantee fast food delivery, Swiggy returns only restaurants within four to five kilometers of the customer’s location. The Directions API is used by drivers to easily route to restaurants and customers. The customer can track the progress of the delivery and estimated arrival time using a mobile app or the website.

“Google Maps provides the most accurate and reliable data, which is crucial for us because maps and location are central to our business. We also knew Google’s intuitive interface would provide a great customer experience with little to no learning curve… Google Maps’ ability to provide customer location and the distances of nearby restaurants is the backbone of our success, because it ensures a reliable, consistent customer experience,” said Aman Jain, Senior Product Manager, Swiggy.

Data-savvy businesses increasingly rely on images and videos for critical functions, and yet are challenged by the sheer mass of information—more than 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video are created daily. This explosion in visual data has paved the way for the growth of computer vision, a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers to “see” the world similarly to the way people do, but with unblinking consistency, and greater accuracy. 

The transformational impact and value of computer vision solutions are significant and has been a guiding objective for companies and AI developers. And yet, even as the applications for computer vision increase dramatically, architecting and implementing vision AI solutions remain highly complex. Visual data, such as images and video, are made up of thousands of pixels of information that represent millions of different patterns and meanings, which can make interpreting even a single image overwhelming from a computational perspective.

Many organizations struggle with deployments and fail to operationalize vision AI solutions due to development delays, machine learning and data science hiring challenges, inaccurate output, a lack of integration with existing infrastructure, difficulty of use, and high cost. Plainsight, with the power of Google Cloud resources, is addressing all these challenges and helping businesses by enabling the deployment of vision AI within enterprise private networks that can be managed easily and scaled economically.

Plainsight has announced availability of its vision AI platform on Google Cloud Marketplace. Businesses can now easily deploy end-to-end vision AI to private clouds to realize the full value of their video and other visual data for accurate, actionable insights across diverse use cases.

Delivering on the Promise of AI: Seeing What’s Hiding In Plain Sight

For organizations to integrate AI and machine learning into their businesses successfully, the technology must be powerful enough to solve real challenges, yet fast, easy, and accessible enough to ensure the innovation potential is realized. Plainsight on Google Cloud delivers the power of enterprise vision AI that’s quick and easy to use with Google Cloud resources that enable global scale, increased security, bolstered privacy, unified billing, and cost savings. 

To streamline vision AI workflows, Plainsight facilitates the entire pipeline, from visual data ingestion and annotation, through continuous model training, deployment, and monitoring for easier innovation and faster time-to-production. Our platform accelerates vision AI development in a manner that is complete, accurate, and accessible to non-technical business leaders. We believe that AI should be available and accessible to anyone and everyone—so that teams across entire organizations can reap the benefits. 

By integrating Plainsight into their private networks, companies worldwide can now leverage one intuitive platform for centralized control of streamlined vision AI model creation and training with optimized visual data handling for diverse enterprise solutions. These use cases include: social distancing monitoring, medical imaging, drug compound screening, defect detection in manufacturing processes, identifying gas leaks, or even livestock counting and crop health monitoring for agriculture, to name a few.https://www.youtube.com/embed/A7U_0UkjvEg?enablejsapi=1&

We enable customers so they can create successful solutions that enable them to clearly see their business from all angles and to take advantage of the knowledge visual data can reveal by simply and quickly operationalizing practical vision AI applications.

AI-Powered Dataset Creation, Automated Model Training & Easy Deployment Without A Single Line Of Code 

For vision AI applications, success is inextricably dependent on the quality and quantity of the datasets required to train the relevant models. To aid enterprises in this vital stage, the Plainsight platform provides built-in data annotation for the fast and easy creation of datasets. This includes AI-powered features that accelerate the speed and quality of labeling such as SmartPoly, for the automated polygon masking of objects, TrackForward, to predict and automatically label objects from frame to frame in video annotations, and AutoLabel for automated object recognition and labeling based on pre-trained machine learning models, to highlight a few.

In addition, to ensure the success of AI integration, we significantly reduce time-intensive processes with Plainsight vision AI’s automated machine learning with continuous model training and easy deployment capabilities. In just a few clicks, users can leverage optimizations for the most reliable model training without endless experimentation cycles. And, models are easily deployed at scale all within one, easy-to-manage model operationalization process for the business.

Growing With Google Cloud

Plainsight is a vision AI innovation leader, developing solutions that address unmet needs for challenger brands and Fortune 500s across vertical markets. As a team recognized for succeeding where others have failed, our expanding partnership with Google Cloud provides a powerful combination that helps customers see and activate the value of their visual data with a suite of services in a secure and private manner.

Our vision AI Platform simplifies building and operationalizing AI to solve business problems enterprises are facing every day—and the demand is increasing. To accelerate our journey to faster, more accessible AI for enterprises, we knew we needed strong support to grow Plainsight and scale our backend tools to match our vision. 

Google Cloud delivered everything, and more, in one program. The Startup Program by Google Cloud provided the technology and services for scale and the support we needed to maximize the value the Program provided us. The Startup Program has been a springboard for architecting Plainsight vision AI in the cloud, accelerating our goals and optimizing innovation, efficiency, and growth. The team also helped us optimize Google Ads campaigns, fueling adoption of Plainsight. 

After launching the SaaS version of Plainsight Data Annotation in November 2020, we grew our user base by nearly 110x in just three short months. Google Ads has also dramatically increased website traffic, growing new users by nearly 5.75X and page views by over 5X. The Google team helped us identify where Google Cloud offerings could be leveraged instead of developing in-house solutions and offered best practices that enabled us to deliver faster on our initiatives. 

Kubernetes was already the underlying component of our platform and leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as a managed service removed a layer of complexity. By combining GKE and Anthos, we were able to standardize our deployments, aligning to how our customers leverage Anthos for enterprise applications in their own organizations. In addition, as a fast-moving, customer-centric company we use Google Workspace to help us centralize and manage our day-to-day work internally. By leveraging multiple products across Google’s ecosystem, we take advantage of a holistic partnership that has helped our business tremendously as we scale. 

Leveraging Google’s Partners for Strategic Consultation

To facilitate this expansion of our partnership with Google and to maximize our use of Google Cloud services, we are working with DoiT International, a Google Managed Services Provider and 2020 Global Reseller Partner of the Year. DoiT provides us with ongoing technical consultation for cloud-native architecture, Google Cloud Marketplace integration, production-grade Kubernetes support, Google Cloud cost optimization, and technical support. The DoiT team has been invaluable in compiling best practices, tips, and strategies from their vast experience with various cloud customers to ease our Marketplace integration and is providing input for infrastructure strategy to support our continued rapid growth.

Plainsight Delivers Enterprise Vision AI Through The Google Cloud Platform Marketplace

Plainsight vision AI is now available to Google Cloud Customers on Google Cloud Marketplace enabling organizations across industries to deploy private Plainsight instances within their own environments. Marketplace customers will benefit from Google Cloud privacy, security, scalability and unified billing through their Google Cloud account. 

Combining the powerful benefits provided by Google Cloud resources with Plainsight’s vision AI Platform into private networks, enterprises worldwide can now leverage one intuitive platform for centralized control of streamlined vision AI model creation and training with optimized visual data handling for diverse enterprise solutions. 

Through our Google partnership, we’re able to leverage a powerful foundation that allows us to rapidly innovate, scale and accelerate delivery on our vision AI platform capabilities. By executing on our vision to make AI easier, faster and more accessible for all users across entire enterprises, we’re helping businesses see more and by seeing more, they’ll have the power to solve more. 

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here where you can apply for our Startup Program, and sign up for our monthly startup newsletter to get a peek at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

Google Cloud Results

• Reduced smart parking/smart city IoT installation and operational support effort by more than half
• Enabled development of a Smart Cloud IoT platform in just four months
• Democratised data access and use across the organisation
• Built core infrastructure in under 4 months

Smart Parking’s core product is a sensor-based system called SmartPark, used in environments such as shopping centres, airports, commercial parking operations, universities, and municipal streets.

Smart Parking has deployed over 50,000 sensors worldwide to support parking systems. It estimates at least 70% of production-scale and currently operating smart parking environments globally are using its technologies.

“Our products include ground sensors that use an advanced combination of infrared and magnetic technologies to reliably register a vehicle’s arrival and communicate to a gateway,” says Brian Granatir, Technical Team Lead, Smart Parking. This enables operators to gain live insights into parking environment usage and manage capacity. They can also provide automated guidance and signage to tell customers how many vacant spaces are available on each level of a parking structure or street area of a city.

Additional functionality enables parking operators to identify whether vehicles parked in limited-time spots have overstayed. The operators may notify inspectors who can undertake enforcement actions such as issuing infringement notices.

Another Smart Parking mobile product enables parking operators to photograph licence plates to identify vehicles that have overstayed. The business is also developing applications that enable users to view the number of parking spots available in nearby parking structures.

Smart Parking is extending its operations into smart city developments. The business views this as a natural progression as its parking systems establish a powerful common foundation from which to deliver many other services. “Parking is just part of a very complex ecosystem that requires sophisticated interoperability and generalised analytics,” John Heard, Chief Technology Officer, Smart Parking, explains.

“The biggest trend in the space is towards the Internet of Things (IoT)–the integration of a large number of generic and specialised devices,” Heard adds. “This has led us to shift from the idea of our devices being the centre of the universe. Instead, we put data intelligence at the core.”

In October 2016, Smart Parking decided to develop a SmartCloud platform that would enable cities to manage and react to information from a connected network of IoT devices. The business wanted to start by rolling out the platform based on an event-driven architecture that could connect any device that sends or receives a sequence of data events to existing Smart Parking customers.

The platform would enable Smart Parking to address a wide range of highly complex and interrelated interactions. “Internally, we use the example that if everyone leaves a parking structure at 3pm, what will be the impact on traffic?” Heard says. “So, how can we correlate multiple factors to answer a larger question?”

Heard’s team elected to deploy SmartCloud on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), due primarily to its support for sophisticated big data management and machine learning in a serverless architecture. Furthermore, Google technologies were proven to operate at scale and GCP had baked-in best practices that could manage internet-scale datasets in near real time.

“By running on Google, we were able to develop SmartCloud at an incredible pace,” Granatir says. “We built the core infrastructure in under four months.” Furthermore, GCP enables the SmartCloud platform to operate at metropolis scale, combining streams of distributed data to deliver an unprecedented view of the events and interactions taking place in a city.

Smart Parking now uses a wide range of GCP services to deliver SmartCloud. Google Cloud Dataflow provides processing and Google BigQuery provides management and analytics of big data. Google Cloud Pub/Sub provides real-time messaging and Google Cloud Functions enables a serverless environment to enable delivery of streaming data. Google Cloud IoT Core connects, manages, and ingests data from Smart Parking devices while Google Cloud Identity & Access Management enables Smart Parking to control access to information. Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Google Cloud Functions also support the event-driven architecture.

Installation time and operational burdens cut by at least half

Using Google Cloud IoT Core has cut Smart Parking’s parking and smart city system installation times by at least half and eliminated the need to build a registration system, a device authorisation system, and a feedback loop for each project. This delivers a streamlined and simpler methodology for site installations, which flows on to a dramatic decrease in the operational burdens involved in monitoring and maintaining deployments of all scales.

Using GCP has revolutionised Smart Parking’s software development processes. “We’re building and deploying systems at a speed I could never have imagined before Google Cloud Platform,” Granatir says. Furthermore, using GCP has made data accessible to anyone within the Smart Parking business, and this is being extended to customers via SmartCloud information services.

This democratised approach has already realised considerable benefits. “One of our project managers was experimenting with the Google Data Studio service for visualising data and was able to make a query about utilisation efficiency,” Heard adds. “We found that simply changing the maximum stay time by a small amount could hugely impact the percentage of parking utilisation and, therefore, throughput.

“This is an illustration of a significant insight by someone who simply had a hunch and quick access to mountains of live and accurate data.”

Transition to a data-intelligence company

Using GCP has enabled Smart Parking to chart a path from a sales and maintenance organisation to a smart cities data-intelligence company. “How? Simply by providing amazing services that focus on massive data volumes and sharing documentation that helps us leverage best practices,” Heard says. “Because of Google Cloud Platform and its pricing, we don’t walk in the shadow of giants, we ride on their shoulders.”

Smart Parking is now looking to further extend its use of Google services to add value to its smart parking and future smart city clients. “With Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine, we could gain the ability to identify trends across every customer parking site and make recommendations to operators,” Heard says. “For example, we could provide data-driven insight and advice to operators about how to adjust their parking spot time limits and guidance about how to transform throughput and convenience while increasing revenue.”

Heard concludes, “As a result of being able to dramatically decrease our traditional development burdens by using GCP, we now have a number of exciting new capabilities we have been able to bring in to our roadmap and expand the journey we are able to open up for our customers as well.”