nRoad: Pioneering AI-Powered Unstructured Data Extraction and the Quest for Actionable Insights
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Aashish Mehta, Chief Executive Officer, nRoad
What motivated you to establish nRoad, and what specific opportunities or challenges did you aim to address within the field of AI and unstructured data extraction when founding the company?
I was introduced to the whole world of unstructured content processing and its challenges back in 2006 when we created Corporate Fundamentals. It was my first entrepreneurial adventure. Corp Fund was the first in the industry to automate extraction of data from US annual filings when the state of the industry was dual screens! It was absolutely clear at this point that that space was going to continue to grow. With the volume of unstructured data continuing to spiral out of control and the growing complexity of this data, the generic, one-size-fits-all NLP solutions that businesses have relied on for years are simply no longer up to the task. We saw a massive opportunity. The foundational premise of nRoad is that understanding both the domain and the underlying business context is the essential first step in solving the dark data problem.
note : IDC and Seagate predict that the global datasphere will grow to 163 zettabytes by 2025 and that about 80% of that data will be unstructured.
Can you provide concrete examples or delve deeper into your successful experiences guiding startups to achieve exits exceeding $100 million?
While achieving $100 million is a fulfilling experience, the more fulfilling piece has been delivering over a Billion dollars worth of value to our customers in terms of increased productivity, scaled operations etc thru our solutions.
For any company to be successful, you have to create demonstrable value for your clients. That means:
- Having a tremendous product market fit.
- Being able to market your solutions.
It is important to remember that nothing can be done without the right people and the ability to foster a culture of innovation.
Could you share the backgrounds and experiences of the visionary team leading nRoad and explain their contributions to the company’s success?
We have been together for several years, bringing together people with years of industry experience who have brought their unique expertise to different areas of the business. Our team has a knack for bucking the status quo and innovating and creating innovative products and solutions.
How does nRoad empower organizations to extract insights from unstructured data and documents?
The premise on which nRoad was founded was to democratize insights from unstructured content.
By deconstructing documents in their entirety, nRoad generates variables and insights that can be easily understood and consumed by everyone in the organizations.
In what ways does nRoad’s approach to handling unstructured data differ from conventional NLP solutions.
Generic NLP platforms do not understand the contextual meaning of financial terms and hence miss the mark. We lead with a patent-pending technology framework that leverages deep learning techniques. The framework enables companies to mine and extract actionable insights from both structured and unstructured data sources.
What is nRoad’s primary mission when it comes to deciphering the complex world of unstructured enterprise data, and how does the company transform unstructured data into actionable insights?
For our customers who may encounter hundreds of thousands of financial statements from their borrowers they can have a team sit and manually review all of these documents, or they can have a solution like nRoad’s Convus™ come in to help their process with efficiency and precision. With an intelligent decomposition of document and content structures Convus™ can identify concepts, definitions, relationships, and descriptions across data sources to help derive actionable insights.
How does Convus™ utilize advanced AI and ML technologies to interpret unstructured data, and what distinguishes it from similar platforms? Could you provide insights into the security features that ensure Convus™’s robustness in preserving vital enterprise knowledge?
Convus™ is a modular platform focused on deconstructing unstructured data. The consumption engine is capable of decomposing any form of document to a standard structured representation or seamlessly integrating with any data source to consume information. Information is contextualized and comprehended in the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine, by leveraging knowledge graphs and domain knowledge. Our Generation Engine is capable of producing bespoke outputs and constructing narratives using Natural Language Generation techniques. Convus™ integrates with a business’s existing framework, so there is no outsourcing of information when using this solution.
In your current role as CEO of nRoad, what are your future plans and vision for the company, especially in terms of harnessing AI and automation technologies?
We continue to future-proof nRoad, by continuing to work on creating our own language models that are capable of reading financial documents and unstructured content with high levels of accuracy and precision. We plan to release our own language model to deal with financial statement analysis soon.
