Vernacular.ai, which offers a multilingual artificial intelligence (AI) platform for businesses, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from KStart Capital, the seed programme run by venture capital firm Kalaari Capital, a company statement said.
Founded in 2016 by IIT-Roorkee graduates Sourabh Gupta, Akshay Deshraj and Manoj Sarda, Vernacular.ai automates the customer service operations of businesses through the use of natural language processing (NLP) technology in Indian languages. This enables companies to interact and engage with their customers in the languages preferred by them. The startup has been working with financial institutions to help scale business, reduce operational expenditure and enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Vernacular.ai had launched a business-to-consumer product earlier this year called Aisha – a personal assistant in the Hindi language that caters to people living in Tier 2 and Tier 3 areas.
“The challenges of Indian languages are very different from English. Transliteration in different scripts, identification of context for each language and wide usage of a hybrid combination of multiple languages are complex NLP problems. We are developing our own in-house technology to solve this problem in collaboration with leading industry [leaders] and academia,†said Deshraj in the press note.
Several startups in the AI space have raised funds recently. Earlier this month, health content startup HealthMir raised seed funding from angel investor and insurance industry veteran Nimit Panigrahi.
In February, Botworx.ai, a conversational commerce platform, had raised $3 million in seed investment led by California-based venture capital firm Costanoa Ventures with support from San Francisco-based angel investment firm S V Angel.
Other recent investments made by KStart Capital include Bengaluru-based fintech startup Perpule, which raised $650,000 (around Rs 4.2 crore) from the platform in March this year.
Signzy, an AI and cryptography based platform for digital onboarding of KYC; cloud security startup ParaBlu; AI service platform for financial services Active.ai are some of the companies that form a part of KStart Capital’s portfolio.
Through KStart, Kalaari Capital plans to invest about $20 million (around Rs 135.7 crore) in 40 startups over the next two years.
