Vernacular.ai secures Series A round of $5.1 mn from investors including Exfinity Ventures and Kalaari Capital

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Vernacular.ai, an AI-first SaaS business, announced today a Series A investment of $5.1 million, led by Exfinity Ventures and Kalaari Capital, AngelList, IAN Fund and LetsVenture also participated in the round. The fresh capital will be used to fund the company’s global expansion into Southeast Asia and the US, and towards R&D to further enhance its proprietary AI-based voice automation platform.

Sourabh Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO, at Vernacular.ai said, “As we evolve our voice AI platform – VIVA and expand into newer markets, we will continue to disrupt the legacy contact centre model. Over the last decade, businesses across industries have been competing to deliver a personalized experience and enhance customer engagement. Yet when it comes to resolving a simple customer service call, it can sometimes take over 15 minutes. Businesses are now waking up to the impact of these delays on their bottom lines, and are reviewing and future-proofing their contact centers. Our solution fits right in, and can help enterprises automate upto 80% of call center operations and provide a matchless experience. We are happy to see increased investor confidence in our model.”

Voice AI/Automation systems have a strong foothold in today’s market. This technology has enabled enterprises to accomplish routine tasks in a quick and simple fashion. One of the key areas that have been impacted by Artificial Intelligence is customer service. Innovative technologies such as Voice AI have already been deployed in enterprise contact centers and is rapidly moving these service-based operations towards higher operational efficiency.

Chinnu Senthilkumar, General Partner at Exfinity Ventures said, “Vernacular.ai’s VIVA platform, a Next-Gen Voice AI platform offers a true “Digital Transformation” experience to its BFSI and enterprise customers. VIVA completely eliminates the need for CAPEX intensive legacy IVR solutions, thus offering a superior cost-efficiency to its customers, combined with an uninterrupted 24×7 support and reach. Its scalable, modularised and end-to-end solutions are uniquely positioned to address the growing unmet needs of the South Asian multilingual market. We look forward to some exciting new business opportunities as they grow and expand into a leading AI-first SaaS business.”

Darshit Vora from Kalaari Capital, an existing investor, re-investing in this round said “Voice is the future of human interface with machines. Voice AI for Indian language is a hard problem to solve with diverse languages and dialects. Vernacular.ai has developed the most advanced and accurate Voice AI platform for Indian language. Strong adoption and rapidly rising demand among Indian enterprises is a strong testament of its platform. We are privileged to be the early partners with Sourabh and Akshay in this journey.”

Founded in Bangalore, India, by two IIT Roorkee graduates, Sourabh Gupta and Akshay Deshraj, along with founding team members – Prateek Gupta, Pravendra Singh and Abhinav Tushar, Vernacular.ai is known for its state-of-the-art AI-based voice automation platform – VIVA – a unique product that helps accelerate engagement strategy, and utilize cutting-edge speech recognition and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology to provide superior customer experiences across diverse sectors.

Vernacular.ai’s suite of speech and language solutions is built on top of VASR (Vernacular Automated Speech Recognition), which enables enterprises to convert audio to text by applying powerful neural network models in an easy-to-use API. The API recognizes over 160 dialects in 10 different Indian languages to support the enterprise user base. VASR builds the foundation of the conversational AI platform.

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