Dr. Umar Saif’s Startup Receives Investment from Bill & Malinda Gates Foundation

Former chairman of Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), Dr. Umar Saif’s company has become the first Pakistani startup to receive direct investment from the Bill & Malinda Gates Foundation.

SurveyAuto, an Artificial Intelligence-based data collection application, is expected to take the market research industry by storm with its advanced research and survey techniques. Market experts believe that the startup will prove to be ‘Uber’ of the data collection field.

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What Uber has done to taxi services, they are aiming to do the same to traditional market research companies like Neilsen and Gallup.

Speaking about the development, Dr. Umar Saif thanked Bill Gates for his interest in the startup and said that the company will reduce the cost and chances of human error during the data collection process.

SurveyAuto uses a crowdsourcing model and relies on machine learning to decide who reports data, where it is collected, and when and how often it is reported. This reduces cost and minimizes human errors.

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He maintained that the platform uses machine learning on satellite imagery, open street maps, and google places to accurately identify survey targets and monitors enumerators in real-time using smartphone applications. It automatically analyses the quality of the collected data by using speech and image analysis.

The funding from the Bill & Malinda Gates Foundation is the latest in a series of large-scale engagements of the company. So far, SurveyAuto has been engaged with leading global organizations, including the World Bank, Innovations in Poverty Action (IPA), ITA, and UNESCO.