SaaS startup Memetic Labs Technologies raises funding from Kae Capital, Rajan Anandan & others

Gurgaon-based SaaS startup Memetic Labs Technologies Pvt Ltd which is betting on its social media customer support tool Airwoot, has raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Kae Capital, Google India MD Rajan Anandan, Sunil Kalra and Samir Sood. Kae Capital led the round. The company will use the funds for technology development and talent acquisition.

"The investment provides us an opportunity that will help us bring our service to the market and grow fast. Apart from funding, we are getting access to mentorship and strategic assistance," said Saurabh Arora, co-founder, Airwoot.

The startup was co-founded by Arora and Prabhat Saraswat in December 2011. The duo was later joined by Achal Aggarwal as the third co-founder. Arora holds master's degrees in Computer Science from the Department of Informatics at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and Technical University of Denmark. His partner Saraswat is a post-graduate in Computer Science from ETH Zurich. Aggarwal holds a B Tech degree in Computer Engineering from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi and earlier worked at Infosys.

Incubated at The Morpheus, the startup offers enhanced customer support in real time via its social media listening and analytics platform called Airwoot. The platform enables brands to set up a customer support channel on social media, helps generate only relevant tickets and segregates social chatter into marketing campaigns, praises and spams. To do the same, Airwoot has developed a proprietary semantic engine that uses sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to funnel actionable conversations from social media in real time.

"NLP for noisy text (such as on Twitter) is not trivial. Traditional approaches, which are apt for well-structured text, fail for social media. We have built our technology from scratch to analyse this new kind of language which is informal, short and witty," said Saraswat.

The company has finished pilots with a few of the brands in India and claims to have achieved 3x faster response and issue resolution times, higher quality of responses, and with 2.5x better customer satisfaction. It is now planning to make the product accessible to a larger set of brands in sectors like e-commerce, retail, banking, travel and FMCG which have already set up a social presence online.

"We believe that there is a huge need for social customer care and the team at Airwoot has done a great job of building a great product with a very small amount of capital," said Sasha Mirchandani, founder and MD, Kae Capital.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)