Long before A.I. became the tech industry’s subject du jour, Nasrin Mostafazadeh and her cofounder (and husband), Omid Bakhshandeh, were avidly researching ways to imbue machines with cognitive abilities that mirrored those of humans.
“We’ve spent 18 years of our lives working toward giving machines language capabilities of a 3- or 4-year-old,” says Mostafazadeh. “Two years ago we started our company, Verneek A.I.” The ultimate goal? To help people “make better and faster decisions,” says Mostafazadeh.
Earlier this year, Verneek A.I. launched One Quin, a proprietary A.I. platform aimed at enhancing the consumer experience across industries by bringing together information from all search bars, navigation menus, and chat boxes. Its first use case is Quin Shopping A.I., a tool that helps shoppers with both online and in-person decision-making. “Five to 10 years from now, [I want us to] really become the standard,” says Mostafazadeh. “If I go to a physical store and it says it is Quin-enabled, I know exactly what kind of service I get. If I go to my Chase banking app and it’s Quin-enabled, I know how I can interact with that environment and beyond.”
Operating at the front line of the A.I. revolution presents challenges. “The biggest obstacle, I would say, is how noisy the A.I. scene has become,” she says. “When there’s more noise, it makes decision-making hard on so many levels, from the client side to the recruiting side to the investment side to your own positioning [as a company]. You have to navigate this space with so many often random players that are taking up space and oxygen.”
A fun fact about Mostafazadeh and Bakhshandeh that people don’t know? “We are the most boring people,” Mostafazadeh says, laughing. “We’ve been doing this since we were kids. The only fact I can think of is that we met competing in an international RoboCup competition, which is basically the world’s largest robotic competition for universities.”
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