Airtel picks up stake in cloud telephony startup Waybeo

Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Wednesday said it has picked up a strategic stake in cloud telephony startup Waybeo and inducted it into the Airtel startup accelerator programme. 

The fifth company to be inducted into the programme, the 2009-founded Thiruvananthapuram headquartered startup focuses on deep artificial intelligence (AI)-based analytics for cloud telephony and provides in-depth intelligence services to help marketers drive revenue through ad-driven phone calls. 

“We are really focused on enterprise adoption for our call intelligence tools. Most of the enterprises drive hundreds of thousands of phone calls a month. There is no analytics, no automation, and no means to optimise the customer experience. We look at strategic investment from Airtel as an opportunity to scale our technology and enterprise reach,” Krishnan RV Iyer, CEO and co-founder of Waybeo, said. 

Other Waybeo co-founders are Bushair AP, Shiv Shankar MS, Nithun KV, Bijoy BS and Manu De.

The Airtel startup accelerator programme offers firms access to its data, distribution networks, payments ecosystem, deep market understanding, global strategic partners and advisory services to help them scale up.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-based jobs platform Vahan, conversational AI startup Voicezen, fitness startup Spectacom and English vocabulary learning app Lattu Kids are also part of the programme, the statement said. 

Read: Airtel appoints Ganesh Lakshminarayanan as CEO for enterprise business

“Cloud technologies are transforming the way businesses serve their customers. We are thrilled to onboard Waybeo to our startup accelerator programme and provide them a platform to scale up their technologies as part of Airtel’s cloud services ecosystem,” Adarsh Nair, chief product officer at Bharti Airtel, said. 

The public cloud services market in India is expected to reach $7.1 billion by 2024, as per data from market intelligence firm IDC. 

Last month, Airtel announced a multi-year strategic collaboration with Seattle, Washington-based cloud solutions provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) to cater to the growing public cloud services market in India.