Arts
Young Lankans make it to the world’s largest start-up incubator
“Autochatic” (https://autochatic.com ), an innovative start-up founded in 2017 has become the first ever Sri Lankan start-up to join the prestigious Station F thus securing the country’s presence amongst global tech giants. Located in Paris, France, “Station F” is the world’s largest start-up incubator with the capacity to accommodate more than 1000 start-ups under one roof.
Autochatic co-founders Januka (left) and Dinal (right) at Station F
“Autochatic” is the brainchild of three friends – Dinal Kurukulasooriya, Januka Samaranayake and Harsha Jayaweera who are passionate about transforming people’s lives for the better by reaping maximum benefits from technology. Dinal Kurukulasooriya who has a strong background in business and mathematics is a computer science engineering graduate from the University of Moratuwa. He has worked for Denso group writing software used by modern Japanese vehicles. A chess prodigy, Januka Samaranayake who won the Under 19 chess championship at the age of 14, has studied Computer science at the University College Dublin. Harsha Jayaweera is a self-taught programmer with more than a decade in programming and previous start-up experience. They all left their highly paid corporate jobs to pursue the dream of building an initiative to serve individuals and businesses through Artificial Intelligence.
Headquartered in Paris, “Autochatic” has already spread its wings to New Zealand, Singapore and plans are on the drawing board to expand their operations to other countries as well.
So what does “Autochatic” do?
In simple words, as the name “Autochatic” implies, their focus is to automate conversations through natural language understanding and rich User Interfaces (UIs) on top of messaging mediums.
What makes “Autochatic” exceptional is that their software as a service (SaaS) platform allows anyone (small and medium-sized businesses) to build their own chatbots easily in no time.
Autochatic co-founder Harsha speaking at Disrupt Asia
These chatbots are multilingual, context-aware and most importantly, require no coding. So, with “Autochatic” it’s very simple to build your own customized chatbot depending on business requirements and they will guide you through the process. “Autochatic” have dedicated teams that will help you to build them or even build a Chatbot for your needs.
“Autochatic” has supported many local and international companies to create automated messaging platforms enabling efficient means of communication with their respective and targeted customers. From renowned corporates in domains such as insurance, banking, healthcare and telecommunication to start-ups, they have kept their trust on this advanced technology driven start-up in building customized chatbots to suit their business needs. Even you can try to create your own chatbot which is easy as drawing a flowchart by visiting their website (https://autochatic.com ).
Leading international organizations such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Ubisoft, L’Oreal and Asian tech giants like Naiver have already established their offices in Station F premises transfiguring Paris into a leading technological hub.
There is a huge competition among start-ups all over the globe to secure a place in this state-of-the-art incubator. The only way to get in is by an application process which has an acceptance rate as low as 6%. It is a highly competitive process and only the cream of the crop gets the access. In this context, Autochatic making it to the Station F as one of the first Asian start-ups, is a remarkable achievement for the Sri Lankan technology sector.
Station F: A place for innovation