Vernacular.ai, a multilingual artificial intelligence platform for businesses, has announced that it has secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Kstart Capital, the seed program of Venture Capital firm Kalaari Capital. As a part of this funding round, Sumit Jain, Partner at Kalaari has joined the company’s board.
Commenting about the investment, Sumit Jain, Partner, Kalaari Capital, said,
There is a significant opportunity for Indian AI startups to solve India specific problems both for businesses and consumers. We are confident that Vernacular.ai will become the engagement partner of choice for businesses that want to leverage AI to solve for core issues.
Founded by three IIT Roorkee graduates – Sourabh Gupta, Akshay Deshraj and Manoj Sarda, the company is presently working on multi-lingual conversational agents for financial institutions. It has been working on interesting use-cases resulting in scalable ways to increase business, reduce operational expenditure and enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Akshay Deshraj, chief technology officer at Vernacular.ai, said,
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 Natural Language Processing (NLP) problems. We are developing our own in-house technology to solve this problem in collaboration with industry and academia.
Vernacular.ai had launched a B2C product earlier this year called Aisha – a personal assistant in Hindi for people living in Tier-2 and Tier-3 areas. As per the company, the product saw strong traction with 50 thousand users exchanging over a million messages in a short period.
The company is building NLP Technology in Indian Languages to enable businesses to interact and engage with their multi-lingual customers in the languages preferred by them.
Kstart, an initiative by Kalaari Capital, has a unique seed fund designed to empower next generation startups and accelerate disruptive ideas to become market-leading companies. Its focus is to enable visionary founders to build game changing businesses by combining all key factors necessary for startup success.
