Leading artificial intelligence company Senti AI gained another momentous milestone as its chief executive Ralph Vincent Regalado was named the 2020 Injap-Sia Outstanding Young Entrepreneur Awardee in the Service Category at Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s 46th Philippine Business Conference & Expo.
The PCCI Injap Sia award recognizes young entrepreneurs who are able to innovate ideas to develop new markets, create wealth and generate jobs.
Coming from the academe as a professor at De La Salle University, Regalado dabbled in the startup scene when he joined Ideaspace’s StartUp Weekend Manila. He pitched the concept of an AI-backed analytics software that was able to understand Filipino languages and ended up winning. The winning solution became Senti AI’s first product—Pulse.
Fast forward a few years later, Senti AI launched five more products and became the leading AI solutions and services company in the Philippines. Under Regalado’s leadership, the company combines nearly three decades of academic research with deep industry experience to produce cutting-edge AI projects with meaningful impact.
Two of these projects are the Machine Learning HackFest 2019 where the company conducted a hackathon that encouraged the local AI community to help NGOs in the Philippines augment their limited manpower by leveraging Artificial Intelligence.
Most recently, Regalado and his team teamed up with the Department of Health to create an AI system that helps deliver accurate, timely and updated information on Covid-19 policies for the whole Philippines.
As countries around the world embrace AI at a rapid pace, Regalado continues to use his knowledge and expertise to help the Philippines become AI-ready. With his passion for education and innovation, he conducts activities that help nurture the local tech community and empower the country.
Some of these activities include traveling around the Philippines to educate marketers, teachers and doctors about artificial intelligence, helping the country nurture a generation of AI engineers, data scientists and AI enthusiasts by establishing the AI Pilipinas community.
He represented the Philippines in the ASEAN-ROK Start-up Summit at Busan, Korea (where he bagged 2nd place against other countries), judged and mentored startups, technology teams locally and internationally and produced numerous NLP background projects and research papers to help expand and develop the scientific knowledge about the subject. His works can be found in Google Scholar.
“For every new wave of innovation, it’s an opportunity for countries to leapfrog their way to the top. This is the reason why we built Senti AI—to help the Philippines speed up our adoption to AI by enabling organizations to understand its value and apply it. We know that it’s a challenging task, but we are driven as a team to succeed, so we can bring more job opportunities to the country, to be recognized as one of the leaders in the field, and to prove that Filipinos can be at par with the talents of the world.” said Regalado.