MyAniML: Revolutionizing Cattle Disease Prediction and Monitoring

Diseases that spread in the cattle industry often lead to sickness in humans due to the consumption of beef or dairy. As a result, the provider has to recall the product, costing them significant money. So, a sick cow is a no-win situation for anyone.

Imagine a cow coming into a processor shop to be processed as beef, and the cow is sick but isn’t showing the symptoms. What if a dairy cow is milking but isn’t showing any usual symptoms of the disease where it needs to be treated? The symptoms of the disease often appear only after the disease has taken over. By then, the cow is contagious and is spreading diseases. And if you consume the products or by-products of other cows that were close to the sick cow but didn’t show any symptoms – the possibilities are that you may get sick.

But what if there was a way to know if a cow would be getting sick? What if preventative measures could be taken to help reduce the disease spread and sickness among humans? This is where MyAnIML comes in.

By utilizing MyAniML’s service, a cattle owner can get notifications 2-3 days before the symptoms appear. This way, the owner has plenty of time to isolate that one cow and not have the cow spread disease to others. This saves money and helps protect the consumer’s health as well.

We recently interviewed MyAnIML’s Founder and CEO, Mr. Shekhar Gupta, to know more about the company’s trailblazing technology and its vision for 2022. Read on for the excerpts from the interview.

Q. What was the motivation behind starting MyAnIML?

Technology is being used in health and for the well-being of humans but rarely for the animals that impacts us. AI is used to scan a human face and determine if that person may have a dementia or scan an eye and determine if that person may get a heart attack but hardly any efforts are made in detecting diseases in other living organisms.

MyAnIML is being developed to solve a crisis brewing in animal industry that has a tremendous impact on humanity and its health. The technology is being developed for cattle but can be used in other animal sectors. We are starting with cows because this is where the crisis is coming and no one is realizing it.

There are 94M cows in US and 5-7%  die each year in the U.S. and the number is higher in other parts of the world. Properly disposing the remains of those dead cows becomes a serious issue. Various diseases spread very quickly within the herds of cows and the product and by-products of the sick cows impact us as well.

Q. Could you tell us about the underlying technology that helps you predict diseases?

We developed our own AI algorithm because what we are developing is very novel. Nothing like this was out there and no one had done any work in developing an AI accordingly. We use off-the-shelf cameras to take pictures or videos of a cow or a herd and the system extracts individual pictures of cow’s faces  from the video or a picture of a herd and those images are fed into our AI to determine if a cow will be getting sick. Our AI algorithm analyzes each face and muzzle of a cow to determine the health of that cow. Then a notification is sent out to the cattle owner.

Q. How does MyAnIML’s solution drive revenues?

The MyAnIML solution not only saves the treatment costs and prevents deaths of cows, but also increases revenue. On average, a cow loses about 50lbs per disease and the average cost of beef stands at about $1.75/lbs. So, if a cow gets sick and loses weight, the owner gets less money. With the MyAnIML solution, the owners can sell other healthy cows at a higher rate because they can show that those cows are not sick, thus, getting more revenues. This also reduces disease outbreaks and lowers recalls, which also contributes to the revenues.

Q. What does innovation mean to your company?

Innovation is everything to us. We strongly believe that in order to stay in business and be profitable, the company has to continue to innovate. Innovation doesn’t necessarily mean invention but new ways of doing business. We are working on both fronts, inventing new things and innovating new ways of doing business in our industry.

The company came out of adopting what was and is going on in human world to the animal segment. We have been very successful in innovation and developing new ways of doing things. One of the biggest challenges in the animal tech industry is that the ranchers work very hard from before sunrise to after sunset and if we were to provide them with extra work, they wouldn’t use our product. So, we have made our rollout very easy, much like plug-and-play technology.

Q. How do you define your company culture?

Our culture defines us. We are a very diverse team and very proud of this fact. Everyone brings their unique way to a solution and we get to figure out the best way to help our customers. We are all empowered to make decisions that are best for the company and all of us are playing our individual role in making this company a success. We all know our mission, and our goal, and we all know how to make the goal a reality. 

Q. What does the road ahead look like for MyAnIML?

2022 is the launching year for us. We are entertaining  many partnerships opportunities. We also have an ongoing trial with a major University and USDA that  has brought us closer to our goal. We are continuing to improve upon our processes to become better in serving our customers. Every person in the company knows our goal of providing better service and determining a new way to serve our customers. By the end of this year, we will be a much larger company than we are today. We have many interested potential customers and investors.

About the Leader

Shekhar Gupta, Founder and CEO

Shekhar Gupta has over 25 years of experience in developing and launching technology products and companies very successfully. He has been involved in cloud since the turn of the century, IoT and AI since 2006, and blockchain since 2011. He has worked for fortune 100 and startups. He has had startups on his own as well. He is dedicated to the technology, the cause, and how it will help lower the crisis brewing in the animal sector.

“MyAnIML is being developed to solve a crisis brewing in animal industry that has a tremendous impact on humanity and its health.”