IDG Ventures India and Kalaari Capital have invested $3 million in Singapore-based Active.ai. The firm aims to utilize the newly-raised capital to accelerate the development of more advanced AI features for its platform.
Founded by Ravishankar, Shankar Narayanan and Parikshit Paspulati, Active.ai develops intelligent virtual assistants for financial service institutions. These virtual assistants come in the form of bots, SMS or voice API’s.
Founded this year, Active.ai is registered in Singapore and has a team of 22 employees. Run by Bangalore-based Active Intelligence Pvt. Ltd, the startup plans to utilize the funds to improve the technology behind its platform focusing on the development of more advanced AI features. It is also seeking to widen its user base in Asia and north America and expand its offshore development center in Bengaluru.
Active.ai is helping banks redefine their digital strategy for the future, bringing in automation and intelligent customer engagement to banking and payments, said Shankar Narayanan, COO and Co-Founder, Active.ai. He added that Active.ai will also extend its product to enable commerce via chat and to insurance technology as well.
The platform enables banks to offer services to consumers in the chat format. The consumers just have to chit-chat with the UI which is quite friendly, intelligent. The usage of the platform ranges from getting the balance in the account to transferring money to friends and paying bills. The bot can be integrated via various channels, including Wechat, LINE, Kakao Talk, Facebook Messenger, Amazon Echo and Siri.
Bala Srinivasa, Partner, Kalaari Capital, in a statement, said,
Messaging based mobile banking has become a strategic imperative for banks globally to enhance consumer experience and lower customer engagement costs. Active.ai is poised to tap into this large market opportunity with its chat and AI powered mobile customer engagement solution.
Earlier in May, Kalaari Capital had invested $500K in Active.ai as a part of Kalaari Capital’s accelerator program Kstart
