By the end of Q1 FY26, OneAIChat expects to onboard at least 30,000 users on its platform. Once it starts clocking revenue, OneAIChat has a rough estimate of generating $761K in sales in three months
It's almost the end of 2024, and by now, you are likely familiar with ChatGPT -- a platform that has revolutionised how people write, code, or carry out various creative tasks. You've probably also come across other generative AI (GenAI) tools like Claude, Bard, and DALL-E.
With the rapid rise in GenAI adoption and an ever-growing number of models available, users often face the challenge of selecting the right tools.
However, what if there's a single platform that could offer access to multiple GenAI tools under one subscription plan at a fraction of the cost?
This is exactly what OneAIChat is currently trying to do. The Mangaluru-based startup aggregates various GenAI tools into one platform, helping users save time and money while eliminating the hassle of juggling multiple AI tools.
While the approach isn't entirely new, and a few international companies are already working on this concept, OneAIChat is undoubtedly one of the pioneering names from the country to be pursuing this. In its endeavour, it desires to serve users in creative fields and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) use cases.
Founded in 2023 by Prasad Kale, OneAIChat claims to provide one subscription with unlimited access across various LLMs, potentially saving professionals 30-40% on the AI tools available in the market.
As the enablement layer of GenAI continues to get stronger and attract more investments, OneAIChat is set to play a critical role in India's GenAI market set to breach the $17 Bn mark by 2030.
OneAIChat's Game Plan
It is now well-established that GenAI is shaping almost every aspect of human communication, content creation, science and research, and business management, gradually becoming part of our everyday lives.
Despite transitioning from a solely free-to-use platform to a subscription model starting at $20 per month, ChatGPT's user base has continued to grow significantly. It recorded more than 200 Mn weekly active users in August this year.
However, the problem is that ChatGPT has its shortcomings. For instance, it is largely good at generating human-like text responses to different prompts but struggles with certain domain-specific questions and hallucinations. In many cases, Anthropic's Claude has proven to perform better than ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, OpenAI's Sora, which is specifically built for video generation, is often compared to Stability AI's Stable Diffusion. Even Elon Musk has entered the fray with Grok AI, focussing on image generation.
Besides the main foundational models, more than 1.2 Lakh transformer-based models are available in the market across natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal use cases such as audio-to-text, text-to-image, video-to-text, and so on.
As OneAIChat has taken the multimodal approach by bringing several of these models together, the startup is helping create comprehensive content by generating blogs, visuals, audio, documents, and music. Yet these are categorised and focussed towards precise industry needs.
Speaking with Inc42, OneAIChat's founder Kale said, "When we say aggregation, it's not just providing ChatGPT and Gemini or Mistral of the world, we have partnered with the likes of Haiper, which has been doing text-to-video for the last eight months now; we have partnered with Beethoven, which is an Indian company for text-to-audio; we have also partnered with some niche image generators like Ideogram."
OneAIChat is also building its own models, using various open-source foundational models. Currently, these models have 11 "focus categories", including health, marketing, coding, faith, science, finance, and art.
Prasad, who comes with more than a decade of product development experience in Reliance and startups like MobiKwik and Intelegain Technology, dedicated the last one year to building these in-house models and forging partnerships with the global GenAI giants.
While much of it requires subscriptions, certain tools in OneAIChat are free of cost. Besides, the startup is not B2B focussed and is rather providing common users with its platform.
How Does OneAIChat Make Money?
One of the key factors driving the growth of OneAIChat is the high subscription fees of existing GenAI models and applications. This is also exactly where the GenAI aggregation startup has an edge.
To give a few examples, ChatGPT Plus has a monthly cost of $20 while ChatGPT Pro comes with a $200 monthly cost. Similarly, Claude Pro and Gemini Advanced cost around $20 per month.
On the other hand, OneAIChat offers six tiers of subscriptions -- from $13 to $1,000 per month -- which include unlimited free access across 10 or more tools and models that users can pick and choose from.
Its daily subscription plan starts at $13 (INR 1,099) and provides access to all pro models provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, Stability AI, Google's Gemini, DALL-E, and more, and allows generating an image to audio documents, and more.
OneAIChat's monthly subscription costs around $84 (INR 7,099) with access to the same features. Besides, the platform also provides quarterly and yearly subscriptions.
OneAIChat's founder Kale said that besides the attractive price points, the platform also stands out because of its unique daily subscription feature.
"Two of our biggest differentiators are that we provide unlimited tokens (the prompts) and not restricting users to a monthly subscription," he said.
According to the founder, users often come to pro-generative AI platforms for specific tasks and don't need them for a full month. So, now they don't have to subscribe to multiple platforms and pay $200+ for a full month when they only need it for a day or two.
The Road Ahead For OneAIChat
The journey of OneAIChat has just begun. Currency, the startup is growing its footprint markets in India, the US, the UK, South Korea, China, Australia and Zealand, Japan, Canada, South America, and a few other European countries with free access to its platform.
The startup is currently bootstrapped but plans to raise $9 Mn-$10 Mn in the next three to five years in external funding.
By the end of the June quarter of the next fiscal year (Q1 FY26), OneAIChat expects to onboard at least 30,000 users on its platform when it also sees a revenue inflow.
Once it starts clocking revenue, OneAIChat has a rough estimate of generating $761K in sales in three months.
Meanwhile, the startup will continue to refine its LLM models and develop highly sophisticated models fine-tuned for domain-specific use cases, particularly in health and finance.
Going forward, OneAIChat expects its largest revenue to come from the European region, followed by the Americas.
With US-based platforms like Magai and Poe developed by Quora working on a similar business model and TCS launching the GenAI aggregation platform, WisdomNext, for businesses, it will be interesting to see OneAIChat tap into the vast global market opportunity.
All said and done, while OneAIChat's innovative aggregation model holds promise, the startup faces stiff competition from established global players and emerging Indian rivals. Its pricing model and focus on individual users could carve out a niche but long-term success will depend on staying ahead in a rapidly evolving GenAI landscape.
