Chatbot startup Haptik partners Amazon to automate customer support & cultivation

Conversational artificial intelligence platform Haptik has said it is partnering Amazon's cloud subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer chatbots that automate customer support, client cultivation and sales analytics. 

The bots help enterprises reduce customer-support cost, generate better leads on potential clients, and drive sales, the Mumbai- and San Francisco-based startup said.

Such bots can be found in call centres and customer-service workflows, DevOps management, and in use as personal assistants, the firm added. (DevOps is a practice that aims at unifying software development and software operations.)

For the chatbots, Haptik said it will use AWS tools such as Elastic Cloud Compute, Relational Database Service, CloudFront, Kinesis and Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech service.

“In cooperation with AWS, Haptik aims to rapidly expand in the Indian chatbot artificial intelligence (AI) market. AWS has invested deeply in AI for more than 20 years, and given that we already work with many of their services, it was a natural next step for us to come together to offer the solution,” said Aakrit Vaish, founder and chief executive, Haptik. The new bots provide enterprises with tools such as chat-level bot analytics, bot builder, and agent chat interface, he added.

Haptik was incorporated in August 2013 by Vaish, and Swapan Rajdev, who serves as the tech chief. Before founding Haptik, Vaish was heading the India operations of Flurry Inc., a mobile analytics, monetisation and ads firm that was acquired by web services provider Yahoo in July 2014. He also co-founded and headed a real estate platform for college students, which was acquired by CommonFloor in April 2014.

Previously, Rajdev was a software engineer at marketing software firm Radius Intelligence Inc. The former Accenture consultant is also founder of Zing! Apps, which creates web-based iOS applications.

Haptik raised its first round of funds worth $1 million from venture capital firm Kalaari Capital in September 2014. In April 2016, the company raised its Series-B round of funds and forged a partnership with Times Internet Ltd, the digital business arm of media conglomerate Bennett Coleman and Co. Ltd., sparking the exit of Kalaari.