Umakant Soni

Umakant has spent 19 years in Technology domain with close to a decade of experience in the area of Artificial Intelligence in diverse aspects of Investing, entrepreneurship and product building. He is the co-founder of AI foundry, focused on “building leapfrog AI ventures for next 6 billion users”. Umakant is also co-founder of ARTPARK (AI & Robotics Technology Park) being set up by IISc (Indian Institute of Science). 

He is a pioneer thought leader building a global think tank using AI for bringing cheaper and more efficient access to resources in the developing world. Umakant is also a nominated expert by Govt. of India on GPAI (Global Partnership on AI)’s working group on Innovation and commercialisation. Before this, Umakant co-founded pi Ventures (India’s only Artificial Intelligence focused $32 m early-stage venture fund) along with Manish Singhal. He was general partner and part of the investment committee at pi that has backed some of the leading AI companies (Sigtuple, Applying AI to pathology (www.sigtuple.com), Niramai, Applying AI to early breast cancer detection(www.niramai.com), Locus.sh, Ten3T Health (Intelligent heart patch), frontdesk.ai (chatbots for enterprise), Wysa (Chatbots for mental wellness), Switchon(AI for industrial systems) and others. He is now Advisor & Founding partner at pi Ventures. 

With an exposure of AI area of almost a decade as an entrepreneur and investor, he is much sought after technology advisor in the area of AI for Government of India initiatives for NITI Aayog, DST (Department of Science & Technology) & MEITY, helping in the thought process of an "idea to impact" AI innovation engine for India. Umakant also advises Fortune 500 companies in the area of AI strategy, investing and disruption as well. He is a noted keynote speaker on developing impact via AI & deep tech innovations in emerging markets. Prior to this, he started one of the earliest Artificial Intelligence companies out of India, Vimagino, focused on providing emotionally intelligent chatbots to help solve sales and support issues on web and mobile for companies in 2009-10. 

Umakant has also been an advisor and investor in startups in gaming, food, education, and logistics. He has 2 patents published in the area of autonomic process systems. 

He is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and KTH Stockholm and enjoys painting abstracts in his spare time. 

On becoming the Senior AI Advisor to Sweden India Business Council, Umakant says: "Next 15 years are going to belong to hyper innovation with AI and Robotics. Looking forward to building the India-Sweden collaboration bridge for this era!".