- Former Funding Societies CTO Ishan Agrawal founded AI startup Branch.
- Branch leverages large language models to boost e-commerce search relevance.
- The startup aims to address the gap between conversational and keyword queries.
Transforming e-commerce with AI technology
Former Funding Societies CTO Ishan Agrawal is entering the AI space with the launch of his new startup, Branch AI.
The Y Combinator-backed company, co-founded with ex-Twitter engineers Govind Chandrasekhar and Praveen Sekar, leverages large language models and related technologies for e-commerce.
Branch AI aims to address the industry’s shift towards more conversational search queries that keyword tools struggle to handle. The platform provides tools to boost relevance for long-tail and zero-result searches, enhancing conversion.
The start of branch AI
According to Agrawal, Branch AI’s AI models understand product catalogs and user intent to tune search results, reducing operational complexity and costs automatically.
After serving seven years at Singapore FinTech Funding Societies, including as CTO since 2020, Agrawal departed to launch Branch AI this past July. Backed by Y Combinator, the startup highlights the revenue losses retailers face from limited keyword search capabilities.
Branch AI hopes to fill the gap between conversational queries and keyword searches with its AI-powered platform. Agrawal stated Branch AI’s technology reduces the need for extensive manual search tuning, allowing retailers to optimize relevance and conversion for a wider range of natural language queries.
To read the original article in its entirety: https://www.techinasia.com/exfunding-societies-cto-launches-ycbacked-ecommerce-ai-startup