Earlier this month, Malaysia-based Tapway officially launched SamurAI, a cutting-edge Vision AI platform designed to help organisations analyze video footage and images, transforming this data into actionable insights without coding.

The SamurAI platform comprises two main products: SamurAI Copilot and SamurAI Central. The technology can be applied across various industries, including policy compliance enforcement, product quality inspection in manufacturing, health, safety, and environment (HSE) monitoring, product counting in plantations, vehicle tracking, and restaurant hygiene compliance. The platform aims to streamline operations and enhance decision-making processes across various applications.

Tapway also announced its partnership with Japan-listed Asteria, a leading no-code software development company, in a significant move to expand its market reach. This collaboration aims to co-develop an AIoT Suite product bundle to enable users to implement comprehensive end-to-end solutions by integrating cameras and IoT sensors to trigger smart actions.

This marks a crucial step for Tapway as it seeks to penetrate new markets in Southeast Asia (SEA) and Japan, leveraging Asteria’s established presence in these regions.

Founded by CEO Lim Chee How, who previously worked with Airbus Group on technology and system integration projects, Tapway is run by a team of around 30 members. The company serves various industries, including retail, F&B, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and smart cities, focusing on system integrators, IT managers, and operations managers.

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Although Tapway has been self-funded since its inception in 2015, the company plans to raise funding in late 2024 to capitalise on growing demand and momentum in the market.

On being an AI startup in SEA today

In an email interview with e27, Lim discusses the biggest challenges an AI startup in SEA faces today. We also touch upon major tech companies’ dominance in the global AI field.

As a SEA-based AI company, how does Tapway plan to deal with it?

“I strongly believe that AI startups in SEA should not be competing with the major tech companies to compete in the LLM space but to build products around models that have been trained by them,” Lim answers.

“Tapway, for one, has been working with Meta and Anthropic vision language model (VLM) to integrate into our processes, including image autolabel with prompts using VLM, image filtering and extraction from videos using VLM prompts as well as integration of the latest VLM models into the SamurAI Copilot inference software. I believe that the Gen AI tools created by the major tech companies are not a threat, but a boon to the AI industry.”

Lim also points out that the increasing popularity of AI presents significant opportunities for his company.

“As AI becomes more mainstream, businesses are more open to adopting AI-driven solutions. Tapway plans to seize this opportunity by quickly integrating the latest state-of-the-art Vision AI technology into the platform and making the product user-friendly and easy to use without any AI technical knowledge. Fundamentally, the Tapway vision is to bring Vision AI to everyone by making it affordable and easy to use,” Lim says.

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“Also, by focusing on specific industry use cases and demonstrating how SamurAI can address these specific needs in terms of operational efficiency, quality control, workforce productivity, and workplace safety, among the few, Tapway aims to position itself as a leading choice for organisations looking to integrate Vision AI into their operational processes.”

Coming soon for Tapway

Tapway is poised to introduce several groundbreaking innovations in the next 12 months, focusing on advancing Vision AI technology.

Key developments include the integration of an action recognition model training pipeline into SamurAI Central, enabling users to upload, label, and train models to analyse video content rather than static frames. Additionally, users can fine-tune their Vision Language Models (VLM) with their own datasets, and intelligent video search capabilities using natural language queries will be introduced.

Furthermore, Tapway plans to integrate with no-code IoT middleware platforms like Asteria, enabling a comprehensive Vision-Compliance-Action pipeline.

“Tapway’s major plan for 2024 and beyond includes expanding its market presence in Southeast Asia, enhancing its product features, and continuing to innovate in the Vision AI space. The company aims to strengthen its position as a leading no-code Vision AI platform provider and cater to a growing range of industries and applications,” Lim closes.

“Specific strategic initiatives may involve scaling operations, building new partnerships, and further developing the SamurAI platform to meet evolving customer needs.”

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Image Credit: Tapway

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