We talk to Sunil Ranka who in the last 17 years, has built analytics and solution processes on more than 10 billion worth of businesses. He is the founder of Predikly (A Data Innovation Company) which thrives on solving any platform, application, and data-related problem. As a Venture Partner at Znationlab, Sunil is a mentor and has invested in 17 startups. He is also a featured writer for The Forbes Technology Council.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
• How Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is being used in industry today
• What is Information Process Automation (IPA) and how it works with RPA
• Will robots take our jobs and what we can look for in the coming years
• How Artificial Intelligence plays a part with Robotic Processes Automation
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Thank you so much to Elisa Chiu, the founder of Anchor Taiwan, for introducing Sunil Ranka and making this episode possible.
Guest Info:
• Connect with Sunil regarding investments at sranka@znationlab.com
• To find out more about Predikly, email Sunil@predikly.com
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Disclaimer to the Transcripts:
The transcript was generated using an Artificial Intelligence program and then scanned over; we would like to thank you in advance for understanding that there might be some inaccuracies. While reading, one might also notice that there are times were the sentences are not grammatically correct and due to changes in advertisements, the time stamps do not always align with the show. We are keeping the text as true to the interview as possible and hope that the transcript can be used for a reference in conjunction with the Podcast audio. Thank you and enjoy.
Intro 00:00
You’re listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast.
Intro 00:47
Welcome to the Silicon Valley Podcast with your host Shawn Flynn who interviews famous Entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists and Leaders in Tech. Learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 01:09
Sunil Ranka, thank you for taking your time today to be on Silicon Valley.
Sunil Ranka 01:13
Hey! Thanks, Shawn. It’s my pleasure.
Shawn Flynn 01:16
To give the listeners a little bit of the background. Could you talk about your journey in tech from the beginning to becoming an investor and now the CEO of Predikly.
Sunil Ranka 01:27
Oh, yeah, sure. It’s always a pleasure to talk about this. It’s been a fascinating journey. For the last 18 years, I’ve been in the tech industry, especially in Silicon Valley. I’m an immigrant. I came from India, in the year 2000. I started my journey as a Java J2EE development. I spent five years with Oracle, I spent five years with them, built two products and got a patent done. Then I left Oracle and joined a very early stage company. We were like three people in the company and we grew the company from three people to 35 people. The company got acquired. And that’s when I tasted the first success of, if this makes sense, you know, that’s what Silicon Valley is all about. You just put your hard work and your thoughts. And then there are people who are going to appreciate your efforts.
Sunil Ranka 02:08
Post that, I went back to Cisco. I spent six years as a consultant. I did a lot of data engineering and data services work for the business group, which are ranging from a $2 billion in revenue up to like a $10 billion in revenue. And then during that time, I became an Article A. So, there were only 19 people in the world at that point in time. And this is a title given by the Oracle company to certain individuals for the product and technology thought leadership. Post that, I went and joined a company called FCS which got acquired by TEK Systems, which was about $10 billion in revenue. And I was part of the analytics division. And that’s where I, you know, had an opportunity to build a big data practice. Post that, I joined a company called Alta Scale, which was the startup that got acquired by SAP, then I started my own company called Analytos, which got acquired by a company in Texas.
Shawn Flynn 02:58
You said RPA. Could you elaborate on that?
Sunil Ranka 02:58
I took a break then become a part of this venture arm called Z Nation Lab. Z Nation Lab is an accelerator. They were raising funds, I put money into their initial fund, and they said, “Hey, you know, what? Why didn’t you come as part of the core team as a venture partner?” Then, they said, “Okay, why don’t you just come together as a core team?” And that’s how I invested back into Z Nation Lab. Right now, what we have done are about 31 investments. Eleven of them are Y Combinator side. I do get invited to Y Combinator every year. And while I was doing all this, I wanted to build a company of my own one more time. This was two individuals, very bright individuals, who are helping one of the portfolio companies, named Sunil Bodke and Sachin Niravane. They were founders of this company called Neighbor Technologies. We merge hand together, and now it’s called Predikly. We had a great journey. It’s about a year-old company. We started with about a handful of people. And right now, we are about 80 people on board, and we focus on RPA AI. We just continue to grow as a company.
Sunil Ranka 04:02
Yeah, it’s been very interesting. And you know, I would say that I’ve been one of those lucky ones who always been a part of a bleeding edge. So, there’s a cool concept called leading edge or bleeding edge technologies. I was early on part of the cycle where, you know, business intelligence or analytics was getting popular from a systems perspective. Then I became a part of this whole journey of the largest scale system like big data, and then machine learning and RPA. Now, fundamental perspective, RPA is a robotic process automation, which stands for automating the mundane task, what an individual does. So think about it, what 15 or 20 years back the manufacturing industry did where you had these people building the cars by themselves and hardware robots automated their job, wherein the RPA is a software robot, which will help you automate your daily mundane task done by the human, So that we can make the human more smarter, compared by having the software robots do their job. So, in short, RPA is about reducing the repetitive mundane tasks to be operated and done by software robots.
Shawn Flynn 05:14
So, this all sounds like process automation. And if that’s the case, what if it ends up taking a lot of people’s jobs. So why would people accept RPA?
Sunil Ranka 05:25
Great point, Shawn, from the surface of it, it does sound like that. But think about this way, right? What makes you wake up in the morning and go to war? I will just ask a very basic question: why are you so excited about this interview? Why are you so excited about any of the other things that you do? What makes you get out of your bed every morning?
Shawn Flynn 05:45
Excitement to learn, knowledge, new things on the horizon.
Sunil Ranka 05:48
Perfect, you nailed it. The key thing is knowledge and new learning is what human psychology would make you excited about. Even my five-year-old kid, right, will not go to school, if they continue to repeatedly do the same job, which it means is RPA, robotic process automation. And think of RPA as your friend, an RPA is going to… My mantra of RPA is, “Let’s make today’s world end the repetitive tasks. Most of the people are 70% tactical and 30% analytical. Using RPA, you could flip that switch. And you could make people 70% analytical and 30% tactical, which means use RPA as a smart assistant of yourself, who would continue to do your repetitive job. And you can make that one fundamental decision, which will complete the process.”
Sunil Ranka 06:44
I’ll give you a very simple example. Today, when we talk to financial analysts or the people who are in the finance department or supply chain department, they do a lot of mundane tasks of receiving invoices, doing a three-way matching. Or in the supply chain, they take the invoice receipts and enter them manually. And they spent at least eight to 10 or 15 hours a week doing that kind of job. And it’s a very repetitive and error-prone job. But imagine, you have somebody who’s an assistant to you, who’s going to help you pull that information. And all you have to do is analytical thinking. Saying that yes, information entered is correct or incorrect. And let’s say okay, just go ahead and submit the data into the transactional system. Now, by doing this, you’re making every job very exciting, because now people are thinking and applying a human brain which is the most precious commodity in the world. Hence, what you’re doing is, an RPA is going to allow you to become smarter and a new learning on a daily basis. So, whoever is going to embrace the journey of RPA, it’s not that they’re going to lose the job. But they are going to take the help of this particular software to make yourself more smart.
Shawn Flynn 07:59
So, Sunil, if someone needs a part of their job to be taken over, haven’t we forgotten about that job experience that the worker has? And they have seen many different scenarios and situations? Doesn’t this human experience have a very difficult aspect of it that’s difficult to replace by out-of-the-box software?
Sunil Ranka 08:20
You’re right. As we said that you never hire anyone without experience, or you hire somebody with experience. But the expectation is that over the time period, that individual will grow into the experience, and that particular person will become more valuable to you. And that’s the reason, I mean, you must have heard the word called AI or artificial intelligence. So, this is a perfect segue to talk about what IPA is, which is intelligence process automation. If you look at the paradigm, there are two parts of the paradigm. RPA, which is a robotic process automation. It is fundamentally a lot more rule-based or the process which is pre-defined. But IPA is more like a thinking process-based, which means if I’ve got like step one, two, and three, RPA is great, but if I have something, a process, which is one-two a thinking step, and three. In that case, the IPA, which is an intelligence process automation is a candidate.
Sunil Ranka 09:22
With the invention or with the acceptance of cloud technologies, skill computing is becoming mainstream. It’s no longer something which is… Think of the past. Even though AI, artificial intelligence, has been in the industry for last 20 or 25 years, I met a lot of people who got like more than 40 years of experience, and they said, “Hey, I’ve done my Masters in AI way back in the days and you know, now it was not even available for everyone. But thanks to cloud computing, it’s very easily accessible, so and so forth.” Now, if you combine AI, RPA, and AI is your brain part of it. And as you must have heard this thing called machine learning. And it gets smarter all the time. So, the combination of AI and RPA, invariably called IPA, intelligence process automation, is an answer to your question that yes, you’re absolutely right. If you’re trying to build a worker, or so to speak, in this world of RPA, it’s called Digital Worker. That Digital Worker needs to have a brain using technology. The only way you can implant a brain into any technology is AI, which is artificial intelligence, which is like machine learning or pattern recognition or computer vision. So, combination of both is the answer to your question that yes, the experience is much needed. But once you build the processes, which are augmented along with the AI plus RPA, they will grow into the experience.
Shawn Flynn 10:47
So, going back a little bit, how is RPA right now being used in the industry?
Sunil Ranka 10:54
Just to give you a little bit of background of RPA, it’s a process automation or robotic process automation. And automation is not something which is fairly new. Automation has been in the industry since the days we had like larger computers or IBM mainframes. We can think of automation as a cobbling together of a few scripts together and automating certain part of the task, so people don’t have to do the repetitive task or the repetitive quotes to be right.
Now, coming back to the use cases, the questions you ask, knowing the history of RPA is a little bit more interesting. So, there are quite a few companies today who do RPA and are pretty popular on those things, with no bias of any individual company, right? So Predikly is a specialized system integrator of Automation Anywhere. They’re the leaders in the market. And there’s a company called UiPath, Kofax, Blue Prism. The company Blue Prism in 2012, coined the word RPA. They came up with this word and Blue Prism was one of the first companies to IPO in this whole scenario.
Sunil Ranka 11:54
The fundamental use cases for RPA today are three areas: finance, supply chain, and HR. But there are a lot more areas. People are becoming very intelligent in terms of automating the processes in a BPO, a business process outsourcing as well. But if I give a simple example, in case of finance, a simplistic concept called let’s say, ACH or the wired payment. So the way the process today works is once you send an invoice to a company, they will look at the payment due date of the invoice, they’ll validate that if it’s a right invoice and they’ll make sure the customer is right, and the amount is right. All these things are done humanely today. But a bot can go and do all of it on your behalf. And even submit for the ACH or the wire payment. And somebody from a CFO or a financial analyst can look at all these wire payments and say “Yes, good to go.” So, the process which could take 40 hours for people to complete, could be done in less than like an hour. And that’s a 40x improvement. So, finance is a great use case. In case of supply chain, the receipt processing or in case of pure land closures or purchase order or creation. All these are mundane tasks today, because there’s a lot more inventory rematching, lot more customer matching, a lot more customer validation that happens manually today. Those could be done by then. So, as we speak today, from RPA perspective, financial, FinTech, supply chain, and HR. These are like some of the could use cases.
Shawn Flynn 13:26
What questions would a CIO, Chief Information Officer, ask themselves when considering adopting RPA into their company’s work system?
Sunil Ranka 13:35
Great question. And the reason is RPA is such a new field. It’s getting so popular right now, just to give a little bit of background before I answer this question, the RPA Phil itself, it’s a 100 billion dollar. From a services perspective, it is much larger than what people anticipated a few years back. And that’s where the opportunities and that’s the reason all CIOs are trying to get onto the bandwagon of this. With no offense of anything, right. But you don’t want to feel left out or it’s more like fear of missing out. But at the same time, everyone has that whole apprehension of “Hey, what is RPA? What are the right questions to ask? Where do I begin from?” So what I do is when I talk to a CIO, so I spend a half a day with some of the leadership team because one thing is, rest assured that this has to be a top-down approach rather than a bottom-up approach, thinking that “Hey, you know what, somebody is silo in the information technology. An IT organization starts doing something and this will populate, pop up.” These are very fundamental, basically, the way you think, the way you do the process chain. Think of this as a new company culture, because RPA brings a new world culture, because once you bring a Digital Worker, it’s a new world culture for you, you need to start thinking of Digital Worker as another human being, which is, you know, hiring into their organization. And when you start hiring people into the organization culture, because it’s more important. So, for example, the moment you start outsourcing, the culture of that country becomes more important. Same way, when you start hiring Digital Workers, the culture of the Digital Worker becomes more important.
Sunil Ranka 15:07
So, there are questions which you know, in everyone’s mind, am I ready for RPA? Is it the right thing to do? What is the right to do? Or what is the right ROI? So, some of the questions, typically, you know, to start asking is, I’ve seen people getting a lot more success, or the special, the CIO, who are already on the bandwagon or journey of digital transformation. Because I would call this a digital revolution, not the transformation because you’re bringing in a different culture altogether into the company. So, questions, right questions asked is, “What is the percentage of my workforce is spending time on the repetitive mundane tasks? How important is a repetitive mundane task? Are they rule-based? Or are they a lot more thinking-based? I have enough backlog of innovation. And I’m strapped on the bandwidth needed so I can hire new more people, but at the same time, to edge the competition. I need to outsource some of these things.” The moment you start thinking of outsourcing, you are thinking of RPA. The moment you are strapped in terms of the bandwidth, where you say, “Hey, you know, I’ve got a lot more repetitive, mundane tasks.” This is the right time to think about RPA. So those are some of the things which you need to start thinking about.
Shawn Flynn 16:22
You have mentioned ROI just a moment ago. So how could a business using our RPA, how would it evaluate the changes and calculate the ROI?
Sunil Ranka 16:34
Just for everyone’s knowledge, right ROI, return on the investment, because for me, ROI is relationship over issues. So that’s altogether a different topic. So, ROI is return on the investment and a great point. And what happens is, when you bring in a different technology, when you don’t bring in a different way of doing the things, or when you bring in a different culture altogether into the company, right? You need to be very sensitive about the ROI because it’s not something which you can… It’s like a marriage. When you get married, right, you own up the commitment of it. So, there are different ways to look at the ROI. And most of the customers that we work with have some kind of a mandate in terms of… At least I have a mandate where if a process is not saving you more than $50,000 after implementing an RPA, that’s not the right process to automate it. And listen until the amount of what you spend. And if you’re not getting 3x to 4x return on investment in one to three quarters, that’s not the right investment.
Sunil Ranka 17:31
And how do you calculate the ROI? It’s nothing but just under the fundamental of software part of it, which means you need to calculate the cost of ownership of the new software, if you’re building it overseas buying it and I think we can just talk a bit more about that in a little bit, once I answer this question of yours. In terms of the ROI, you need to do the total cost of ownership, which means the cost of the software. You need to think about how you’re going to support and maintain it. Do you have enough staff? Do you need to hire new staff? Or do you need to bring in a partner? So those are some of the calculations you need to bring in in terms of the ROI calculation. But more importantly, from the build perspective, either you’re going to build it or worse is buy it, which means build it, which means I’m just going to take a technology that could be as simple as Java, Python, .NET. And cobble the scripts together. And I’m going to go and hire a platform, like Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, or UiPath, to do my job. And that’s also, as part of your ROI calculation, because are you just solving a problem, which is today’s problem, and you don’t anticipate anything for the more? And that’s when you can take the journey of building. But if you want to bring in a platform, which would solve not only today’s problem, but not anticipated problems, which are going to occur in like three months, six months or two years from now, then you bring in a platform. So those are the fundamental things in terms of ROI calculation.
Sunil Ranka 18:55
So in case of ROI calculation, you look at the cost of the software, maintenance of the software to support other software, costs of the development, how much of your resources would be needed, and more importantly, once after you do all of it, the process is ready, how much of the bandwidth improvement I can do off my staff, which means how more I can make it the process efficient, what is going to be the cost of error? So, for example, in case of a three rematching, if a human makes an error, and if it’s a half a million-dollar ACH payment. And if it goes wrong, it will be wrong, where a machine will not make that mistake, because machine is the dumbest thing you have ever invented, because you’ve trained the machine to be smarter. That means the body you’re going to make is going to be trained to do the job that you’re telling it. So those are some of the things you need to anticipate and keep in mind when you’re doing the ROI calculation.
Shawn Flynn 19:51
There was one thing you didn’t mention that I think would give the audience an insight. Tell us about what ROI means to you because I heard it there. I’m not sure if everyone caught it.
Sunil Ranka 20:02
Shawn, you caught me. So, ROI for me is the relationship over issues. I heard it from one of the leaders at Cisco, at practice on a daily basis. And it helped me in my personal life as well as my professional life. And what it means is the issues which are occurring right now, are they blown up? Or are they big enough for me to let the relationship go? Which means I am working with a customer and the customer is very demanding and unreasonable. I’m just going to calculate the issues that okay, is this issue big enough for me to let the relationship go? So simplistic example, in case of marriage, if they are husband and wife, and if the husband did not wash the dishes one evening, would they let the marriage go? If the husband is cheating on a wife, would you let the marriage go? So that’s the concept. So, I do the same thing in my professional life as well as with my employees or my partners, with all my investors. If the issues are too tiny, and the issues are going to be there all the time in your life, are these issues what will let go of your relationship? And if they’re not, that’s the ROI. That’s a relationship over issues.
Shawn Flynn 21:18
Sunil, we’ve already talked about it. But can we go into a little bit more detail about how artificial intelligence works with robotic process automation and information process automation?
Sunil Ranka 21:30
IPA is intelligence process automation as we speak. You got it right, I mean… So, the VI will put this conversation in together and think of, let’s say, the entire automation world is a nine-piece puzzle. We’re just scratching the surface right now. And we have identified two pieces of the puzzle, which is RPA and IPA. We don’t even know what the rest of the seven pieces look like. As we talked about RPA, it is a repetitive mundane task, rule based. IPA is a process automation with intelligence and that’s the reason AI becomes a very important part of the conversation.
Sunil Ranka 22:09
Now, let’s think of it this way as if you take a support mechanism. Like you and I just talked about it a few minutes back, you said, “You’ve got this great system right out here for the interview. And you’ve got a set of people sitting all together in a different part of the world, helping you out with the support.” Now think of those and you actually, invariably, you may not even know those people. Now, if you look at any support mechanics, right, the level one, level two, level three and level four, those are typically four levels of support. Level one is your just knowledge discovery, what we call it, which means if I can type it, and if the machine can understand what you’re asking for. And if I fed the information, but it should be able to tell you using artificial intelligence, even the level two could be something part of the level in a similar fashion.
Sunil Ranka 23:02
My point here is the combination of AI and RPA is nothing but IPA. So the great use cases are like chatbots, or your document processes, which means if a supplier, let’s say take a company like Ford, or take an oil and gas company, they’ve got 10,000 suppliers, everyone has a different way of putting the invoices. Now, if you want to intelligently automate invoice processing, every invoice is going to be a different way. But if I can put artificial intelligence, then every time you scan an invoice, the software should be able to recognize what kind of invoice it is, or what kind of document it is to begin with. There are different types of documents. There are legal documents, there are purchase documents, these are invoice documents.
Sunil Ranka 23:50
Now using AI, I should be able to classify the document to begin with. Once I classify the document, I should be able to recognize information because a pure number invoice number could be right corners, left corner. The software should be able to intelligently do it. Because today, what a human does is you lift a piece of paper, you look at the paper and you say, “Okay, this is an invoice,” because you are able to read it. And you say, “Okay, this is the invoice number,” because you are able to read the labels, as long as the software is able to do that.
Sunil Ranka 24:22
The company Automation Anywhere, they’re invested very heavily into some of these artificial intelligence part of it, which means they call a product called IQ Bot. They have invested very, very heavily into that. We support our customers who are implementing some of those intelligence processes. So that’s the chatbots intelligent way of classifying the documents, that’s nothing but IPA piece. So, the combination of AI and RPA together is nothing but IPA. So, as I said earlier, right? RPA is step one, two, and three, IPA is step one-two, a thinking process, and step three, based on the decision that was made on step two. So those are some of the key differentiators between RPA and IPA.
Shawn Flynn 25:08
So, with that, though, it sounds like you need a full team of engineers to attack any of these problems. So, in this combination of artificial intelligence, RPA and IPA, is this something that there’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there, startups that they’re working on? And if so, what are some examples that you’re seeing?
Sunil Ranka 25:27
As we talked about our RPA, or automation as an industry, not of a trillion dollar, with 100 billion in a potential services revenue. It is bound to happen that people are going to make the most out of it, especially in Silicon Valley. If you bucket out any technology, there are three buckets, or three facets, or so to speak, I call it. What is a corporate part of the world? Second one is the venture part of the world. The third one is the entrepreneurial part of the world. And within the entrepreneurial world, right, you got like two sets of people. One is a product route, and another one is the services route. So, the opportunity is so huge that corporates are looking for a painkiller, which means they have a problem, they want to solve it. Investors are looking for vitamins, which means, “Oh, painkillers are readily available off the shelf.” They’re looking for a vitamin which is going to strengthen the problem statement much better. And entrepreneurs want to latch on to that part, which is what vitamins they can build so that they can get the funding, they can attract the venture part of the world.
Sunil Ranka 26:38
What we’re seeing right now is if you followed the market last year, or less than a year, there’s been more than a couple of billion dollars invested into only a couple of companies like Automation Anywhere got north of half a billion dollar from SoftBank. UiPath caught a similar number of numbers, and the valuation was increasing like 3x, 4x every few months, not even a few years, which is a very, very unusual investment cycle. At the same time, there are a lot more smaller companies investing as well. Or the buildings are like a lot of chatbot companies are coming up, a lot more document scanning companies are coming up. In fact, in the last Y Combinator, there were a couple of companies, they just did an intelligence document scan. And they were like with new customers, their valuations were north of like $12 million or $20 million. That says a lot in the journey that people are taking right now in the company. It enforces… They are investing very heavily to prepare people in this kind of area. And that’s the reason a company like Predikly… because it’s more attractive to people. The reason is we already have more than 80 people who have been on this industry journey for the last one year. And it is very rare to find a company like this. So those are some of the opportunities of what I’ve seen. And that’s the reason we believe that our investment is going to be higher returns over the years.
Shawn Flynn 28:04
So, stepping back from Predikly, you yourself are also an investor, could you talk about some of the investments you’ve made and what you’ve seen in the space with those investments?
Sunil Ranka 28:14
So yeah, we’ve been… as part of the Z Nation Lab, we have done about close over 21 investments so far. And I was just reading one of the investment updates I got this morning when I was coming for this interview. So yeah, we latched on IPA, or AI, plus RPA journey very, very early on. So, we’ve got some investments into our portfolio companies called SMAT Bot, which means a smat or smartbot which does an automated level one, level two, four.
So, you don’t even need to hire people. So right now, there are companies who have stopped outsourcing their level one, level two support. And another company where we have an investment, which is helping you automate your foot traffic. So, what happened is depending upon the different cameras and the different IoT device, it helps you identify the larger foot traffic map for the sales. And it will give you an end of the week, your placement at this particular location on you so much. And if you have the right inventory system of the POS, point of sales, you can even come back and tied back together saying that, “Okay, yes, this is where my placement is the right way to do it.”
Sunil Ranka 29:27
Earlier, all the listing things were done by humans, which means somebody had to keep track of, you know, where the inventory was kept. Somebody had to keep track of what was the sales, and somebody has to do this. And it used to take literally weeks and months before they could realize that the placement of the product is incorrect. And what happens in most of the cases in retail, these are seasonal products, if you are not into the food industry, which means your unit, you got to wait for another season and so on and so forth. Some of these things we are automating, and that’s the sum of our investment has been.
Shawn Flynn 30:00
What advice would you have for someone outside of Silicon Valley about things to look for in the future or areas to learn more about?
Sunil Ranka 30:09
You’ve been in Silicon Valley, Shawn, I mean, you talked to a lot of entrepreneurs. In fact, you have a unique platform where you’re bringing people in, who have been there done that in the past. And just correct me here, because I would like to take your opinion as well on this that Silicon Valley is all about persistence, perseverance, and a belief. Once you know that this is the right thing, you got to believe in yourself. But more importantly, you should be ready to put your billion-dollar idea on fire. And when I say literally on fire, which means either you go all in. And if you’re halfway through and you decide, or you figure out that this is not the right idea, you should have a stronger heart to do it. Do not get emotional with an idea. You need to be honest to yourself, you know, to be honest to your investors, you need to be persistent about what you want to do. And more importantly, you need to believe in something. If you do not believe in something, it’s never going to happen. And the most important thing is a team. I believe RPA and IPA is the thing for the current. But the future is even brighter, because as I said, we are just scratching the surface, we don’t even know. But there’s a reason our main focus has been investment into AI and RPA. And that’s what we’ve been looking for in the companies. And that’s why I invest into Predikly. That’s why, you know, I am building as a founder of this particular company.
Shawn Flynn 31:42
Would you like to talk a little bit more about Predikly and what you are able to offer?
Sunil Ranka 31:48
As the name suggests Predikly, it’s very interesting that I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. I said, “Hey, you know what? I’m starting a company.” And he said, “What would be the name of the company?” And I said, “Predikly.” And he said, “Yes, I’m going to give you work.” And I said, “You don’t even know what I’m going to do.” And he said “No, Predikly itself, the name itself says something related analytics, because that’s my forte, something related machine learning and something related to protection.” And I said, “How do you make it happen? How do you know that?” And he said, “The name itself sounds that.” So as the name suggests, Predikly is “prediction likely,” which means PREDIKLY. So, we are hosted on predikly.com. We do three things very well, which I believe is the need of the hour and the future as well. We do a lot of product engineering on Cloud. We do AI services. So Predikly, one of my portfolio company called Hotify got acquired by one of the larger companies called Sonasoft. It’s an OTC listed company. So, we’re building our own cloud on Hotify technology.
So Predikly has its own AI cloud. So, we do a lot of AI services plus RPA. And we had an exclusive partner with Automation Anywhere. We have an exclusivity to an extent that we are the one of the largest part of who contributed to their board store. We are one of the very few partners in the world who have a Center of Excellence. So that’s kind of a thing. So, we do product engineering on Cloud. We do a lot of AI services, and we do a lot of RPA and we focus on oil and gas, FinTech, and healthcare, and internet companies. These are our set of customers and what we deal with today…and transportation.
Shawn Flynn 33:29
And with everything we covered, was there anything missing, any last piece of information we should cover around this topic of RPA, IPA, and AI?
Sunil Ranka 33:39
The field is so huge and vast, right? If somebody’s out there, trying to look for a career change, or trying to look for something more meaningful in terms of the growth plan, invest your time on AI and RPA. Because the beauty of RPA is it’s an extension to your existing systems, which means all you have to do is whatever the existing systems are, you need to integrate with the newer software. More importantly, this is a field that is going to last for the next few more years. Because what happens every software has a life. And this is the beginning of a new life. So, RPA is a must-to-do. But more importantly, this is not a fad. If not, you want a change, at least get educated on this. And this is going to be the thing of the future.
Shawn Flynn 34:28
Fantastic. And Sunil, what is the best way for anyone at home to find out more information about you or contact you?
Sunil Ranka 34:37
People do reach out to me and I’m part of Forbes Technology Council. I write for forbes.com. So, if you google “Sunil Ranka, Forbes,” you’ll land on my Forbes Technology page. Or they can send out an email, if it’s an investment email, they can send out an email to sranka@znationlab.com, which is sranka@znationlab.com and Sunil@predikly.com. You can connect with me on LinkedIn as well at Sunil Ranka.
Shawn Flynn 35:14
We will have all those in the show notes. And I also want to thank Elisa Chiu from Anchor Taiwan who actually made the introduction. I guess you guys met in Taiwan. Is that correct?
Sunil Ranka 35:24
I met her when I was invited by the government of Taiwan to speak at one of the events in Silicon Valley. And she was one of the speakers as well. So yeah, thanks, Elisa, for making this introduction.
Shawn Flynn 35:33
So once again, Sunil Ranka, thank you for your time today on Silicon Valley. And we want to thank everyone for listening and we look forward to giving you more information with some of the most amazing people here in Silicon Valley next week.
Sunil Ranka 35:47
Thank you, Shawn, for the time this morning. I really appreciate it.
Outro 35:51
Thank you for listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast. To access our resources, visit us at TheSiliconValleyPodcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn @ShawnFlynnSV. This show is for entertainment purposes only and is licensed by The Investors Podcast Network. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
