John Chambers, the executive chairman and former chief executive of networking giant Cisco, is in advanced stages of discussions to lead a $3-5 million funding round in Chennai-based speech recognition startup Uniphore Software Systems Pvt Ltd, a report in The Economic Times stated, citing people in the know.
The development comes less than a month after VCCircle reported that Uniphore had raised $6.8 million as part of its Series B round in two tranches between April and July this year. Financial services company IIFL Holdings Ltd had led the round.
It is not clear whether Chambers’ investment is a part of Uniphore’s Series B round.
A spokesperson from Uniphore declined to comment on the development, while email queries sent to Cisco went unanswered at the time of filing this report.
Uniphore, founded in 2008 by Jaypee University of Information Technology alumni Sachdev (CEO) and Saraogi (COO), has raised a close to $13 million in funding so far, according to data available with VCCEdge, the data and financial research platform of VCCircle. Sachdev had also co-founded Singularis Technologies earlier.
The company’s product portfolio comprises speech analytics platform auMina, virtual assistant akeira, and portable voice biometrics platform amVoice. Uniphore claims to be working with over 70 enterprise customers and says it has served over 4 million end-users.
In June this year, Uniphore strengthened its technology and business verticals by appointing Pat Pattabhiraman as senior vice president of core technologies and former Salesforce India executive Ravi Kompella as its India business head.
With close to 100 employees and offices in India, Singapore and the UAE, Uniphore’s backers include Kris Gopalakrishnan, IDG Ventures India, Indian Angel Network, Yournest Fund, and Ray Stata among others. In October 2016, the company had raised $2 million in a bridge round led by IDG Ventures.
