Gaze Technology is an intelligent video analytics startup that builds intelligence capabilities for CCTV cameras that could be used to solve a long list of securities, attendance monitoring, analytics, optimization challenges, and much more.
Founded in 2017 by Shehzad Noor Taus Priyo and Motasim Bir Rahman, the company is an example of how friendships could change the trajectories of our lives and why great collaboration requires a healthy and deep relationship between the collaborators. Friends often make the best co-founders. Some of the largest companies in the world such as Microsoft, Uber, HP, Apple, I can go on, are founded by friends. This is probably a lesson that people who want to build or are building companies should take to heart.
Over the past months, Gaze has grown as a business, raised investment, and it aims to build “a global leader in AI, serving customers across the world and making intelligent video analytics accessible and affordable for all.”
In an interview with Future Startup, published in July 2019, Gaze Technology Co-Founder and CEO, Shehzad Noor Taus Priyo explained how gaze Technology was founded and what it was like in the early days of Gaze Technology. Below is a short condensed version of the story taken from our much longer interview with Mr. Taus published a few weeks ago.
I have been trying to build startups since seventh grade. I built SearchW3, a metasearch engine, back in 2009, hoping to attract local users. After that, I spent a lot of time trying to build multiple local social networking websites with different themes – Boundule, Prithbi Net, Xpressers and EduReto.
In high school, Motasim and I co-founded Incogmito, an anonymous social networking app similar to YikYak.
After Motasim and I moved to different countries (Canada and Malaysia), I took a break at trying to build companies and started working for them instead to gain the first-hand experience. I worked for a Vancouver based e-ticketing startup called Picatic, which later got acquired by Eventbrite. After that, I went on to work for IBM and NVIDIA. As I mentioned before, less than a year after joining NVIDIA, Motasim and I co-founded Gaze.
Motasim and I were discussing ideas when I was in Toronto working for IBM and he was in Malaysia studying at MMU. Despite all the brainstorming, we could not start working on anything at the time since we were both busy with our lives and very far away from each other (plus the time zone difference didn’t help).
In 2017, he moved to Canada. At the time, however, I was in California working for NVIDIA, so it was still difficult for us to work together. So, we recruited two other friends from Vancouver to work on an idea and then applied to Y Combinator – the world’s largest startup accelerator. We were among the top 5-10% of applicants that year from around the world who got invited for an in-person interview but it didn’t work out because we were building a product without a market at the time (a wearable AI camera) which our interviewers rightly pointed out.
We then realized the biggest market for computer vision and AI is actually back home – South Asia (and perhaps other emerging economies). That’s when we decided to start Gaze Technology Ltd in Bangladesh. Obviously, our ideas were shaped by our expertise and experience in computer vision and AI, which is why Gaze is an intelligent video analytics startup.
We offer software that can understand videos or images through technologies like face recognition, license plate reading (even in Bengali), vehicle recognition, object detection, etc.
We are a team of 20 now, growing by the month. We are working with quite a few organizations now, deploying our solutions for purposes like security, attendance monitoring, analytics and more.
We work in a very agile environment – we are always building and improving our technologies. We also try to work closely with academia, staying connected with professors and students in Bangladesh doing great work in our field, sometimes also supporting them with funding.
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This is an excerpt from our interview with Gaze Founder and CEO, Shehzad Noor Taus Priyo. To know the rest of Gaze story and how it has come to where it is today, you could read our in-depth interview with Gaze Co-Founder and CEO, Shehzad Noor Taus Priyo here.
