Conversational artificial intelligence platform Avaamo Inc. has raised $14.2 million (around Rs 95 crore) in a Series A funding round led by Intel Capital.
The US-based company, which was founded by Indian-origin entrepreneurs and has an office in Bengaluru, said in a statement that Ericsson Ventures, Mahindra Partners, Wipro Ventures and WI Harper had also participated in the round.
Arun Chetty, Intel Capital’s M&A and investment director, will now join Avaamo’s board.
With this round, Avaamo has so far raised $23.5 million in total.
Avaamo said it will use the funds to expand its sales and marketing operations to meet demand in the enterprise market for conversational artificial intelligence solutions.
“Avaamo’s conversational intelligent assistants are already deployed globally in more than 40 countries and even greater global expansion is on the horizon as enterprises seek an AI-based conversational computing solution to improve last-mile automation,†said Ram Menon, founder and chief executive officer of Avaamo.
The firm last raised funds in March this year from software services major Wipro Ltd, which picked up a minority stake for $2.02 million. The IT services firm said at that time that it would make an additional investment through conversion of convertible notes issued earlier, taking the total investment to $3.02 million. This would give Wipro a stake of less than 20% on a fully diluted basis. Wipro's investment is not part of Avaamo's Series A round.
Avaamo
Avaamo is an early-stage company founded in 2014 by Menon and Sriram Chakravarthy. Menon is the startup’s chief executive officer while Chakravarthy is the chief technology officer. Both previously worked at TIBCO Software Inc. Menon has also worked at Accenture.
Avaamo is a deep-learning software company that specialises in conversational interfaces to solve specific, high impact problems in the enterprise space. It has developed AI technology across broad areas in neural networks, speech synthesis, and deep learning to enable conversational computing.
The firm’s AI platform offers features such as a natural language processing-based AI engine; behaviour libraries designed to detect hate, frustration, praise and a gamut of other emotions; deep domain machine learning models in banking, insurance, telco, and healthcare, integration to legacy systems and systems of record; deployment options across messaging solutions, websites and portals; and enterprise-grade security, entitlements, and scalability including HIPAA and GDPR compliance.
Its chatbots are deployed in industries such as banking, insurance and manufacturing in over 40 countries and are delivered in eight languages.
Investors
Intel Capital is a stage-agnostic investor that backs companies across sectors like AI, data centres, cloud, big data, Internet of Things, robotics, mobile and 5G connectivity, sports, health and entertainment. Last year, it invested $690 million in other ventures, out of which 42 were new investments and 45 were follow-ons.
Ericsson Ventures not only backs businesses but also provides its portfolio companies with access to its global network of industry experts. Its focus areas include IoT, software-defined networking, AI and ML, analytics, autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, augmented reality and virtual reality, mobile advertising and wireless tech.
Mahindra Partners is the $1-billion private equity and venture capital division of the Mahindra Group. It invests in companies across steel processing, renewable energy, vocational education, retail, consulting infrastructure, media.
