Exfinity Ventures, IAN Fund lead $5.1 mn round in Vernacular.ai

Vernacular.ai, which offers multilingual artificial intelligence (AI)-based voice automation services, has raised $5.1 million in a Series A round led by venture capital firms Exfinity Ventures and IAN Fund.

Returning investors Kalaari Capital, AngelList and LetsVenture also participated in the round, according to a statement.

The fresh capital will help the Bengaluru-based company expand to Southeast Asia and the US, and also enable research and development programmes, it said. 

The company had previously raised an undisclosed amount of funding from KStart Capital, a seed programme run by venture capital firm Kalaari Capital, in May 2017. 

“Over the past decade, businesses across industries have been competing to deliver a personalised experience and enhance customer engagement. Yet, when it comes to resolving a simple customer service call, it can sometimes take over 15 minutes. Our solution can help enterprises automate up to 80% of call centre operations,” Sourabh Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Vernacular.ai, said.

He founded Vernacular.ai in 2016 with fellow IIT Roorkee graduate Akshay Deshraj, along with Prateek Gupta, Pravendra Singh and Abhinav Tushar.

The company uses one of its offerings, an AI-based platform VIVA, to automate customer service operations in Indian languages. This helps businesses engage with their customers in multiple languages.

Vernacular.ai’s suite of speech and language solutions is built on top of Vernacular Automated Speech Recognition (VASR), which enables enterprises to convert audio to text by applying neural network models in an application programming interface (API). The API recognises over 160 dialects in 10 Indian languages.

Last year, another AI-based voice platform Mihup also raised $1.8 million in its Series A round of funding from Accel India and Ideaspring Capital.