Chennai will be the AI hub of India soon, says Uniphore’s CEO Umesh Sachdev

Uniphore, an enterprise-conversational AI startup on November 2nd announced the setting up of its first India AI Innovation Hub in IIT Madras Research Park, Chennai, the place where the startup was incubated.

“This hub in Chennai is uniquely one of our largest offices anywhere in the world…We already do a lot of data science and AI work in Chennai and going forward some prominent research work in the areas of Gen AI and Emotion AI will continue to happen from this innovation hub,” Said Umesh Sachdev, Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Uniphore in an interaction with Moneycontrol.

Uniphore has made significant investments in three areas of AI, including knowledge AI, emotion AI and Generative AI. Sachdev said that the new hub will support Uniphore’s global operations in the areas of research and engineering in gen AI and emotion AI.

This 26,818 square foot space has been designed to support Uniphore's expanding teams in India as they continue to drive the company's global growth and innovation in Enterprise AI.

Uniphore will be adding more workforce to its newly set up innovation hub in the areas of data science, engineering, AI and research.

“Chennai has already shown to India and rest of the world that it has tremendous enterprise SaaS talent… Now, AI is slightly different in terms of how it is sold and the model it is developed. Our hope is starting with Uniphore, Chennai will not just be the SaaS hub of India but also the AI hub of India,” Sachdev said.

Founded in 2008 by Umesh Sachdev and Ravi Saraog, Uniphore has a single integrated platform that performs video, tonal, and emotional analysis to understand customer behaviour and determine how to improve sales, collections, and so on.

The company was incubated in IIT Madras, through its incubation cell and the IIT Madras Research Park. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California and has a global presence in Europe and the Middle East.

“Uniphore was founded 16 years ago and was incubated in IIT Madras, which is in the backyard of where we are and we have grown to be one of the largest AI-native companies and have our headquarters in Palo Alto which is right next to Stanford University. There is a true scale of Indian innovation connecting the Silicon Valley that’s Uniphore,” Sachdev said.

Uniphore globally services over 1,500 enterprise customers in 20 countries covering and has around 1,000 employees globally with around 200 employees in the Chennai office.

Uniphore entered the Unicorn league after raising $400 million at a valuation of $2.5 billion led by American venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), March Capital, Sanabil Investments and Sorenson Capital Partners in 2022.

The firm raised $140 million in March 2021, which takes the total capital it raised $610 million in capital.

In FY23, Uniphore's net profit jumped over 4X to Rs 142.7 crore an increase of over Rs 33.4 crore in FY22, and its consolidated revenue from operations was recorded at Rs 488 crore.

“We already crossed $100 million in ARR and we are growing at a rate of 70% with 40-50 new customers added every quarter,” Sachdev said.