[Funding Alert] Voice AI Start-Up Vernacular.ai Raises $5.1 Mln In Series A Round The fresh funds will be used for the company's global expansion into Southeast Asia and the United States, as well as for research and development to further enhance its platform.

By Debroop Roy

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Vernacular.ai

Vernacular.ai, a voice automation system provider, has raised $5.1 million in a Series A round led by Exfinity Ventures and Kalaari Capital. AngelList, IAN Fund and LetsVenture also participated in the round.

Founded in 2016, the Bengaluru-based company provides voice artificial intelligence/automation solutions to enterprises across financial services, hospitality, food and beverages, and other industries.

The fresh funds will be used for the company's global expansion into Southeast Asia and the United States, as well as for research and development to further enhance its platform.

Why Vernacular.ai

"Over the last decade, businesses across industries have been competing to deliver a personalized experience and enhance customer engagement. Yet when it comes to resolving a simple customer service call, it can sometimes take over 15 minutes. Businesses are now waking up to the impact of these delays on their bottom lines, and are reviewing and future-proofing their contact centers," said co-founder and chief executive officer Sourabh Gupta, in a statement.

According to Gupta, Vernacular.ai's solution can help enterprises automate upto 80 per cent of call center operations.

Commenting on their investment in the company, Chinnu Senthilkumar of Exfinity Ventures said, "Its scalable, modularised and end-to-end solutions are uniquely positioned to address the growing unmet needs of the South Asian multilingual market. We look forward to some exciting new business opportunities as they grow and expand into a leading AI-first SaaS business."

Vernacular.ai's suite of solutions is built on top of vernacular automated speech recognition, which enables enterprises to convert audio to text by applying neural network models in an easy-to-use application programming interface (API). The API recognizes over 160 dialects in 10 different Indian languages.

"Voice is the future of human interface with machines. Voice AI for Indian language is a hard problem to solve with diverse languages and dialects. Vernacular.ai has developed the most advanced and accurate Voice AI platform for Indian language. Strong adoption and rapidly rising demand among Indian enterprises is a strong testament of its platform," said Darshit Vora of Kalaari Capital.

Debroop Roy

Former Correspondent

Covering the start-up ecosystem in and around Bangalore. Formerly an energy reporter at Reuters. A film, cricket buff who also writes fiction on weekends.
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