Srini Koppulu, who was at the helm of affairs at Microsoft India Development Centre as its corporate vice-president and managing director till last year- is now back at what he is best at — dabbling with technology. However, this time he is also investor.

Srini is now the chairman of Setu Software System, an International Institute of Information Technology; Hyderabad incubated start-up company that is focused on search and information access technologies mainly in Indian languages.

“After working for 21 years, you will have some money to invest. The company has products that can stand-out from the rest,” said Srini about his decision to turn an angel investor. He, however, did not divulge his investments in the company.

Two IIT-H faculty —Prasad Pingali and Vasudeva Verma founded Setu three years ago and it has revenues of about Rs 1 crore now coming from software licence. Rediff.com, Samsung, HMRI, Eterno, IIIT-H and Talent Sprint are among its clients.

Setu has a technology that can automatically generate summaries from large texts- single or multiple documents. This will find a great use in media and entertainment companies. Setu also has a search platform that can support about 70 languages apart from English.

This will allow the users to pose a query in their language and the search engine will search for the related content in user’s as well as other languages.

The company also built Semantifire, which reads plain text using semantics to help the machines make a `smarter decision’, said its co-founder Pingali.

For instance, if a user wants to know how many people have worked in an MNC before in a given company, for normal searches the word MNC should be mentioned in their resumes. But through use of semantics, the machine will be able to ‘infer’ what an MNC can mean from the data available, he explained.

krishnamohan@mydigitalfc.com