“Covid 19 – Our Eureka Moment”

We talked to Jimmy Singh Ahluwalia on how The Anti Alias is making brands unforgettable.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Jimmy Singh Ahluwalia: We are glad to be safe! However, the coronavirus pandemic has definitely affected us all, to say the least. Sweden is one of the only countries where the national approach to managing the spread of COVID-19 has relied mainly on recommendations and people taking personal responsibility rather than imposing lockdowns and restrictions. This has definitely enabled my family and me to lead our regular lives where it concerns being able to go to work and go to school, but it is definitely far from “life as usual.” 

While my family and I have been trying to keep our lives as normal as possible to provide a secure, stable, and healthy home environment, it has not always been easy. There have been negatives like not being able to meet family and friends as often and not being able to travel. We can certainly be grateful for our digitalized worlds, enabling us to be in touch with our near and dear ones. In saying all this, we see some positives from this pandemic, too, like spending more time with the children and appreciating the time we have with our loved ones.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded The Anti Alias.

Jimmy Singh Ahluwalia: The Anti Alias was founded 7 years ago by my two partners Shivam and Lark. Three years ago, I joined the company and co-founded The Anti Alias in Sweden. Today, we have a global presence with 3 offices around the world. We are headquartered in Sweden and have development centers in Serbia and India. I had met Shivam and Lark working on several projects in the digital domain, and our synergies matched working together over time. This eventually led us to incorporate Anti Alias Sweden and grow it to where it is today.

A little about my entrepreneurial past- since the early age of 17, I have been an entrepreneur and, to date, has successfully started up 12 businesses from concept to completion. My early career had many entrepreneurial ventures that I have learnt much from.

All in all, I am a multifaceted individual with strong business skills and an aesthetic eye. I seek and create great designs but also consult on the corporate elements for existing businesses and startups. Together, I reimagine what works for the client and their customers and create designs and spaces that are powerfully engaging.

How does The Anti Alias innovate? 

Jimmy Singh Ahluwalia: Innovation is the key process in our organization. Creating new ideas is crucial in order for us to introduce new and improved products to the market.

In fact, Since Covid-19 hit the world over and disrupted education and schools globally, we felt the time was right to introduce a solution that can be relevant in today’s time as well as pass the test of time beyond Covid-19 in a new world with present-day needs.

Our eureka moment arrived after our countless video conferencing calls on various platforms with internal and external teams. We realized early on that working remotely will have its own set of challenges, but our frustration grew when we started to have training calls with teams and realized that no one was paying attention to the content and we were not getting the response we expected out of these training sessions.

Soon, we realized there was no way for us to track their attention and emotions, nor was there any way for us to know that maybe the problem lay in our content and may not our listeners and their attention or emotions.

So, we spoke to other people in a similar situation and soon realized that this was a widespread problem in the online education space, may it be schools and colleges or ed-tech startups doing 1-1 and group classes.

After going through rounds of research and debate, we narrowed it down to our current solution SEEVC – which is a Video Conferencing app with AI capabilities to track emotions and attention of attendees and is linked to an analytics dashboard that gives feedback of online classes/video calls to the educators, course creators, and administrators.

We intend to be the leader in providing actionable insights and feedback on online learning and providing transparent online assessments and proctoring through this platform.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Jimmy Singh Ahluwalia: It is fascinating how so many daily questions could turn into one main question: how do we re-organize to function most effectively? 

Being a global company with teams in different countries, we already had a well-structured routine of working remotely and communicating through digital platforms. 

Digitalization being our core, we have seen vast growth in our business owing to the pandemic and the ever-growing realization of the importance of having a strong digital presence. The Coronavirus pandemic has overall led us to positive growth this year, and we hope to keep this momentum going.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Jimmy Singh Ahluwalia: When the pandemic first hit, we were unsure of what that meant for our future as a company. We had to let go of a lot of our senior staff in the early months as we started to lose some of our big clients. This was very hard on us and taught us to keep fighting and never to give up. Within a few months, we started to see growth again and are now back to pre-Covid levels.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety, how do you project yourself and The Anti Alias in the future?

Jimmy Singh Ahluwalia: To keep regular working schedules, including breaks and end of work, as well as regular update meetings with co-workers, have been a good way to deal with stress and anxiety at work. Keeping short-term goals and long-term goals have also helped us stay positive and focused. 

At the end of the day, we all have to remember that we are all in this unusual situation together and are all playing an important role in our own ways to fight this pandemic. Our focus is developing technology and helping digitalization move to the future.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Jimmy Singh Ahluwalia: Our competitors range from the likes of Infosys, Zoom for Education, Google for Education, and Microsoft Teams. We are providing the next generation virtual platform for education. A user-friendly, secure, and intuitive product that will help make digitalization in education get adapted more rapidly.

Your final thoughts?

Jimmy Singh Ahluwalia: Digitalization is upon us, and as we approach the “Next normal,” our company hopes to help in the industry with digital transformation and provide the next generation—without affecting the safety platform. 

Your website?

www.theantialias.com

 www.see-vc.com