After Indian-born scientist and startup founder, Somdip Dey's deal with a VC to fund his food waste startup – Nosh Technologies – fell apart, Dey resorted to innovative methods to fund his company and its employees. Dey was born in India where his parents – Soma Dey and Sudip Dey - were both artists and were raised in an environment, which was enriched with music.
In 2014, after moving to Manchester, UK, to pursue his master's study, his parents went through a car accident in India. To pay for his parent's medical bill, he sent back all his savings, and to survive in the UK he was forced to collect food from dumpsters that were thrown away by others. This also led him to co-develop an open-source crowd-food sharing platform, that enables the consumer to share their food surplus with other people-in-need. This open-source web application, which was developed as part of team Codeepy, won the 3Scale API award at the 2014 Koding Global Virtual Hackathon, and also inspired many other entrepreneurs in the coming years to develop similar solutions to fight food waste.
Since 2014,after the tragic accident in the family and his experience with food waste,his focus shifted towards reducing food waste by leveraging technology. In 2020, during the pandemic when food wastage at home started to increase, he co-developed the nosh app – an artificial intelligence (AI) based food waste management app that helps the consumer reduce food waste in the household by better managing it their food and consumption. The nosh app eventually led Dey to co-found Nosh Technologies – a food waste startup, with co-founder Suman Saha, a computer engineer from Kolkata.
At the beginning of 2021, the company had an offer from venture capital to fund the nosh project, however, the deal fell apart last minute. To support the employees and operations of the company, Dey built two AI algorithms that are capable of creating music and artwork. Dey has been selling the artwork as NFT on different platforms; and also generating revenue from his music, which is available on all major streaming platforms including Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, etc. Regardless of these methods being highly unconventional, his music and artworks have generated a lot of revenue to successfully fund the startup.
Dey releases music using the stage name InteliDey on different genres, including trance, psytrance, psychedelic & techno. He mentioned, "Growing up music played an important role in my life. It has been a constant source of comfort regardless of what I've been through. During my teenage years, I got introduced to the music of Tiesto, Armin van Buuren, and Eric Prydz; and have been always inspired by them. However, given I had zero knowledge of how to create music myself, I was dependent on my favorite artists to get the type of music that I like. However, when the deal with VC fell apart and I was exploring ways to fund my startup and I asked myself that being a technologist I can now create music by leveraging artificial intelligence. The state of technology is that powerful these days. Henceforth, ended up creating AI algorithms that can create artwork and music; and have been releasing them to generate revenue to fund the logistics of my company. So far, it has been great, especially when my music has got really good feedback and has been streamed more than a hundred thousand times on different platforms. In this way, I can also create music that I particularly enjoy listening to as well!"
Dey's latest music includes the single "Zero Paanch", which is a collaboration between him and Indian rap artist – Henessey, based in West Bengal.
