Uniphore, a Chennai based speech recognition service providing firm for Indian languages has received investment from Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of Infosys along with the participation of existing investors in Series A round.
The financial details of this investment round haven’t been revealed. With this fresh funds, the company is planning for a global expansion, with focus towards advancing its products and core technology.
Earlier, the company had received investment from IDG Ventures India, India Angel Network, Ray Stata and YourNest Angel Fund. It also received seed investment from IIT Madras’ Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI), Villgro Innovations Foundation, and the National Research Development Corporation.
Founded in 2008 by Umesh Sachdev and Ravi Saraogi, Uniphore provides voice and data technologies to transform mobile phone into an enterprise-service delivery platform for banking, lending/MFI, insurance, retail, agriculture, healthcare, education, and government industries.
Uniphore currently has three offerings, with speech analysis at the core of all of them. The startup offers speech analytics to enterprise so as to advance their consumer conversation rates by better understanding of words being spoken.
The startup also offers its own virtual assistant named Akeira. Akeira provides natural, multi-turn and contextual dialog to consumers across a variety of interaction channels to handle unstructured queries eliminating deep-rooted IVR menus.
Its third tool, based on voice biometrics is named amVoice. Through amVoice, Uniphore offers reliable user authentication irrespective of access device and language. It forms a unique biometric voice-print using the characteristics of an individual’s voice. This voice-print can be compared with an existing voice-print database to confirm identity of the user.
In a statement, Kris Gopalakrishnan said,
Continuing on my theme of backing inclusive innovations, I am optimistic of the success of Uniphore. Man-Machine communication is one of the more complex problems to solve. Uniphore’s vision lends possibility of finding a solution to this very difficult problem and the company has already made substantial progress.
Umesh Sachdev, co-founder and CEO of Uniphore, said,
This investment is a powerful endorsement of Uniphore’s ability to provide unique and measurable value to our enterprise customers across industries through speech recognition technology. Additionally, these Series A funds help us attract the best of the talent the industry has to offer in this high-tech niche.
The company currently has offices in India, Philippines and U.A.E with 80 employees spread across all locations. It claims to have worked with over 70 enterprise customers and served over 4 million users.
