Snapdeal founders, Lightspeed back conversational AI startup Yellow Messenger

Yellow Messenger, which offers conversational artificial intelligence solutions for enterprises, has raised $4 million (around Rs 27 crore) in a Series A round of funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and other investors.

Prominent angel investors including Redbus co-founder Phanindra Sama, Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Hypertrack founder Kashyap Deorah, and Google general manager (APAC) Alap Bharadwaj also participated in the round, according to a statement.

The Bengaluru-based startup offers conversational automation on text and voice across multiple channels such as WhatsApp, Google Assistant, Alexa, web and mobile apps. 

Its proprietary technology is industry-agnostic and Yellow Messenger claims its natural language processing (NLP) ability extends to more than 130 Indian and global languages. 

Yellow Messenger has a presence across 10 industries including hospitality, banking, healthcare, energy and consumer goods, among others. It counts Unilever, Bajaj Finance and Dr Reddy’s Labs among its clients.

Yellow Messenger was founded by Raghu Ravinutala, Rashid Khan and Jaya Kishore Reddy Gollareddy -- former executives at Telerad Tech,  EdgeVerve and Storemate respectively. 

The three-year-old startup was previously part of programmes run by Microsoft Accelerator and SAP Startup Studio. 

“Yellow Messenger is tapping into the messaging-centric expectation that Asia’s 4.5 billion consumers have for interacting with large consumer companies in verticals such as banking, financial services, utilities, travel, and e-commerce,” said Dev Khare, partner at Lightspeed.

Deals in the segment

• April 2019: Marketing platform Netcore Solutions acquired chatbot startup Quinto.ai.
• April 2019: Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd committed an investment of $100 million in AI-based conversational platform Haptik for an 87% stake in the company.
• March 2019: FrontdeskAI, an AI-assistant developer for small businesses, raised $2 million from Pi Ventures.