Reliance-owned Haptik to receive $6.6 mn from parent

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) company Jio Haptik Technologies, formerly known as Reliance Jio Digital Services, is set to secure about $6.6 million from parent company Jio Platforms, according to a regulatory filing made on Wednesday.

The first tranche of investment -- $1.6 million -- trickled in on Wednesday, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) filing made on the basis of a board approval on May 29, showed.

The board approved the issuance of up to 6.25 million shares of about 13 cents each, for cash at a premium of about 92 cents over several tranches, the MCA filing showed. The first tranche has issued Jio Platforms 1.5 million shares.

TechCircle has reached out to Haptik co-founder and CEO Aakrit Vaish to learn about the utilisation of the new capital and the business plans ahead, and will update the report accordingly.

Founded by Vaish and Swapan Rajdev in 2013, the platform claims to have reached about 100 million devices, and processed over 3 billion end customer interactions. In April 2019, Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries acquired a majority stake in the company in a $100 million deal.

Since then, Haptik has made two acquisitions of its own.

In July 2019, it acqui-hired Los Angeles-based AI startup Convrg to create full-time operations in the United States. In September 2019, it acquired Mumbai-based conversational commerce startup Buzzo.ai to address a $80 billion global voice commerce market for enterprises.

Apart from AI, Haptik’s technology infrastructure involves the use of natural language processing and machine learning. The company is one of the world's largest platforms of conversational AI.

The chatbot market size is expected to grow from $2.6 billion in 2019 to $9.4 billion by 2024, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.7% during the forecast period, according to a market research report from MarketsAndMarkets.

Advancement in technology, coupled with rising customer demand for self-service and round-the-clock customer assistance at lower operational costs, are key factors of such a market growth, the report published in November 2019 added.