Exfinity Ventures leads Series A funding round in Vernacular.ai

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Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup Vernacular.ai has raised $5.1 million (approximately Rs 38 crore) in its series A round of funding from Exfinity Ventures. Other investors Kalaari Capital, Angel List, IAN Fund and LetsVenture also participated in the round. The startup was part of KStart, Kalaari Capital's accelerator programme.

Vernacular.ai offers software systems which can recognise voice, thereby bringing in efficiency in the way businesses communicate with their customers. The company claims that their software solution can bring operational efficiency among these players and help them reduce cost. It can help enterprises automate 80 percent of their call centre operations thereby reducing cost.

Sourabh Gupta, co-founder of Vernacular.ai, said though companies are trying to offer a better and customised experience for customers, a simple service query might take up to 15 minutes to be solved because of inherent inefficiencies in the systems.

"Businesses are now waking up to the impact of these delays on their bottom lines, and are reviewing and future-proofing their contact centers, As we evolve our voice AI platform - VIVA and expand into newer markets, we will continue to disrupt the legacy contact centre model," he said.

The startup is planning to use the fresh capital to expand in United States of America and South East Asia. It will also use the funds for research and development to strengthen its AI based voice automation platform.

"VIVA completely eliminates the need for capex (capital expenditure) intensive legacy IVR solutions, thus offering a superior cost-efficiency to its customers, combined with an uninterrupted 24x7 support and reach," said Chinnu Senthilkumar, general partner at Exfinity Ventures.

It was founded in Bengaluru by two IIT Roorkee graduates, Sourabh Gupta and Akshay Deshraj along with Prateek Gupta, Pravendra Singh and Abhinav Tushar, Its product helps accelerate engagement strategy, and utilize cutting-edge speech recognition and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology for a better customer engagement system.