India, US-based speech AI player Uniphore raises $51m

The investors include India’s Chiratae Ventures, Iron Pillar Capital Management and Patni Wealth Advisors, as well as Singapore-based and India-focused Sistema Asia Fund. US-based March Capital Partners led the round, with additional participation from Silicon Valley technology investors CXO Fund and National Grid Partners.

Uniphore develops voice recognition AI systems to support customer engagement, analytics and security procedures. The company claims to have experienced 300% year-on-year growth during 2018 following a Series B that included participation by Chiratae, then known as IDG Ventures, Indian financial services firm IIFL Holdings, and US-based JC2 Ventures.

The company describes “conversational service automation” as a $350 billion industry. The idea is that poor customer experience is a serious financial drain on the corporate sector that could become worsened as consumer demands become more complex. This space is expected to be filled by two-way dialogue systems that can detect emotion in the user’s voice.

Uniphore claims to have developed the only platform able to listen and act on language, including specific dialects, detect and analyze customer emotion, and then predict true intent, all in real-time. It also claims to have the broadest language coverage in the segment with more than 80 languages recognized, including a range of Indian vernacular languages.

“Brands were not building meaningful relationships with their customers because they were simply reacting, rather than being proactive,” Sumant Mandal, a managing director at March Capital, said in a statement. “Uniphore’s unique technology enables a proactive approach by recognizing the true intent of customer calls and predicting what is coming next.”

Uniphore was incubated in 2008 at IIT Madras, an Indian research institute. Its technology had been deployed by more than 70 enterprises globally and served more than four million end-users. The company plans to use its latest funding to advance marketing efforts in North America, invest in R&D and expand its 150-strong team globally.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• North America
• Expansion
• Technology
• India
• USA
• Chiratae Ventures
• Iron Pillar
• artificial intelligence