Tag: Coversational AI Platform

Uniphore Success Story | The Leading Conversational AI and Automation Technology Startup

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Uniphore.

The power of AI cannot be underestimated in today’s times. We are living in a world where almost everything is automated through a wide range of AI and other automation tools and technologies.

The introduction of conversational automation is invented to automate customer services and other mundane tasks to deliver a quality service experience. The most special feature of conversational automation is that it automates both conversations and processes.

Uniphore is one of the leading conversational automation technology companies in India today. The company was founded in 2008 by Umesh Sachdev and Ravi Saraogi.

Uncover details on Uniphore’s industry, founders, business and revenue model, funding and investors, and more in this article.

Uniphore – Company Highlights

Startup Name	Uniphore
Headquarters	Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India and Palo Alto, California, USA
Sector	AI, Saas, Conversational Automation
Founder	Umesh Sachdev, Ravi Saraogi
Founded	2008
Revenue	$88.1 million
Valuation	$2.5 billion (as of November 2024)
Website	uniphore.com

Uniphore – About and How Does It Work?
Uniphore – Industry
Uniphore – Founders and Team
Uniphore – Startup Story
Uniphore – Name, Tagline, and Logo
Uniphore – Mission and Vision
Uniphore – Business Model
Uniphore – Revenue Model
Uniphore – Funding and Investors
Uniphore – Mergers and Acquisitions
Uniphore – Partnerships
Uniphore – Growth
Uniphore – Advertisements and Campaigns
Uniphore – Awards and Achievements
Uniphore – Competitors
Uniphore – Future Plans

Uniphore – About and How Does It Work?

Uniphore is a conversational AI platform meant to deliver conversational analytics, conversational assistants, and conversational security to support enterprises in having transformational customer service experiences. Its solutions assist up to 75,000 customer support representatives during about 160 million monthly interactions. With the trinity of voice AI, computer vision, and tonal emotion, the company is transforming communications.

Uniphore is also engaged in offering AI solutions in the areas of Emotional Intelligence to help enterprises resolve disagreements with the help of Emotional AI technology. In addition, it provides Knowledge AI, which is a platform combined with advanced conversational AI technologies to offer all the updated information needed by customers, without them struggling to go through irrelevant information.

Uniphore also provides a Real-Time Coaching Agent. It is a new method to empower companies’ customer service agents to be successful, allowing them to be more productive and efficient, faster, reduce their stress and anxiety, and improving not just their own but also their customers’ experiences.

Uniphore has dual headquarters in Palo Alto, California, USA and Chennai, India with several other offices in countries like Singapore, Japan, Spain, and Israel.

Uniphore – Industry

There is no denying that the technology industry, especially AI and automation is increasing at a rapid rate. The worldwide conversational AI market is expected to develop at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4% from $12.24 billion in 2024 to $61.69 billion by 2032.

Uniphore – Founders and Team

Umesh Sachdev and Ravi Saraogi are the founders of Uniphore.

Umesh Sachdev

A modern-day entrepreneur, Umesh Sachdev is the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. As a young dynamic leader with a pedigree from IITM, Umesh’s unwavering commitment to new technologies has earned him global recognition as the only Indian to be named one of Time Magazine’s 10 “Next Generation Leaders” in 2016, in addition to being a winner of the India Edition of MIT Tech Review ‘Innovators Under 35’ and a Ted Talk speaker. He attended Jaypee Institute of Information Technology and RK Puram Delhi Public School. Umesh was recognised as a creative entrepreneur by the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Technopreneur Promotion Programme (TePP) in 2009.

Ravi Saraogi

Ravi Saraogi is the co-founder of Uniphore and is also the President of Asia Pacific for Uniphore Software Systems. His main responsibility revolves around cultivating recruits for deep technology and other automation solutions in the company. Ravi is presently a member of the Mobile Payment Forum of India (MPFI), where he finds and develops mobile payment business prospects. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from the Jaypee University of Information Technology.

Uniphore – Startup Story

Uniphore was founded in 2008 and incubated at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. In the initial days, the company mainly focused on the development of AI solutions, especially on contact centres or call centres, the main medium used by big enterprises such as airlines and banks to manage customer service. During the process, the founders realised that the power of vernacular speech is not given much attention in human communication. In India, many people are more comfortable talking in their local language. This factor gave them the idea to introduce speech recognition in Indian languages.

After a few years, things changed in 2017 for Uniphore, when Umesh Sachdev pitched his firm and ideas at an MIT event in New Delhi. John Chambers, one of the most notable guests present, heard his pitch. Through Chambers’s guidance, Sachdev decided to move the base operations of Uniphore, the call centres-based AI startup to the USA.

The very renowned, John Thomas Chambers, the former CEO and chairman of Cisco Systems, acquired a 10% stake in Uniphore in 2017 at a $30 million valuation.

Uniphore – Name, Tagline, and Logo

Uniphore Logo

Uniphore’s logo is simple yet super elegant. Its logo shows a colour transition from orange to pink which makes for an attractive colour gradient.

Uniphore – Mission and Vision

The vision of Uniphore says, ” Be the defining conversational AI and automation platform to realize the value of every enterprise conversation.”

Our mission: Give each customer a voice. Why? Because #customerservice is broken.

Uniphore – Business Model

Uniphore operates on B2B software as a service-based subscription fee model. Previously, it had a license fee-based income model. The business of Uniphore mainly operates by offering four core services: U-Analyze, U-Self-Serve, U-Trust, and U-Assist. According to the company, its purpose is to augment, not replace the efforts of call centre employees. The company operates on two core technologies – speech recognition & voice biometrics.

Looking briefly at the main services provided by Uniphore:

U-Analyze

U-Analyze, previously known as auMina is Uniphore’s speech analytics software that assists enterprises in identifying customer problems by studying consumer dynamics and call centre interactions using natural language processing. It monitors agents’ in-call movements and optimises training programmes using artificial intelligence and data analysis.

U-Trust

U-Trust by Uniphore is a speech biometrics software that allows users to validate their identity when working remotely by using their voice. Clients can authenticate and monitor agents with the help of voice biometrics.

U-Self Serve

Uniphore also has voice response software known as U-Self Serve previously known as Akeira. It is a voice recognition software and virtual assistant that helps firms automate customer support.

U-Assist

U-Assist by Uniphore employs deep learning AI models to give real-time help, such as transcriptions and notifications during conversations. It also aids in the automation of dispositions and other post-call tasks.

Uniphore offers these conversation automation solutions to sectors like Banking, BPO, Telecom, and Healthcare.

There are reports that international banking groups in more than 60 countries have been said to have reduced the stress of compliance auditing by 50% by using Uniphore’s interaction analytics software.

Uniphore – Revenue Model

The company typically generates revenue by offering automation software to various clients in Banking, BPO, Telecom, and Healthcare. Uniphore has made a revenue of Rs $88.1 million with over 150K customers in 2022.

Uniphore – Funding and Investors

Uniphore has received $620.9 million in investment through eight rounds. Their most recent fundraising came in the form of a Series E round on February 16, 2022, which made the company a unicorn startup in India, raising its valuation to $2.5 billion. Uniphore is backed by a group of 22 investors. The most recent investors are GoldenArc Capital and March Capital.

Date	Stage	Amount	Lead Investor
February 28, 2022	Series E	$400 million	New Enterprise Associates
March 26, 2021	Series D	$140 million	Sorenson Capital
December 18, 2020	Debt Financing	$14.1 million	–
August 13, 2019	Series C	$51 million	Chiratae Ventures
August 21, 2017	Series B	$9.4 million	IIFL Finance, JC2 Ventures
June 1, 2015	Series A	$5.5 million	Chiratae Ventures
April 1, 2014	Seed	$710K	Indian Angel Network, YourNest Venture Capital
April 1, 2008	Pre-Seed	$100K	IITM’s Rural Technology & Business Incubator

Uniphore – Mergers and Acquisitions

Uniphore has acquired 4 companies.

COMPANY ACQUIRED	DATE OF ACQUISITION	AMOUNT
Infoworks	Dec 5, 2024	–
ActionIQ	Dec 5, 2024	–
Colabo	April 13, 2022	–
Jacada	July 29, 2021	–

Uniphore – Partnerships

Konecta

Uniphore, a global AI leader, has partnered with Konecta, a CX and digital services giant, to accelerate AI-powered solutions globally.

Uniphore – Growth

Financials

Uniphore Financials	FY22	FY23
Operating Revenue	INR 674.6 crore	INR 488.4 crore
Total Expenses	INR 694.1 crore	INR 492.7 crore
Profit/Loss	Profit of INR 33.4 crore	Profit of INR 142.7 crore

Uniphore – Advertisements and Campaigns

Uniphore is quite active on its YouTube by posting various educational videos based on its products such as U-analyse, U-Self Serve, etc.

Their videos talk about how their product works and how it can benefit organisations.

Uniphore – Awards and Achievements

Uniphore has won the award in the Innovation in Data Science Category for their U-Analyse product at the 9th edition of the Aegis Graham Bell Award 2019.
Uniphore has been awarded the 2021 Frost & Sullivan Global Technology Innovation Leadership Award in Conversational Automation.
It was awarded the best product company in the Analytics Solutions category for 2018 at the 6th edition of Express IT Awards.

Uniphore – Competitors

Uniphore has the following competitors:

AISERA
ZoomInfo
Relish AI
Emotibot
Conversica
Interactions
HelloMyBot
Cresta
Satisfi
Acobot
Replicant
Mindsay
Dialogflow
Gupshup
Nuance Communications

Uniphore – Future Plans

After reaching a valuation of $2.5 billion, Uniphore has plans to expand its horizon with customer needs through its Emotion AI platform and seeks to have more refined existing products. The company wants to rebuild its products to improve its customer’s expectations. It has a full-fledged plan to improve the inventions in its Emotion AI platform.

FAQs

How does Uniphore work?

What is conversational AI?

Conversational AI is a kind of artificial intelligence. It simply allows people to interact with computer applications in the same way as they would interact with humans.

Is Uniphore a unicorn?

Uniphore is a unicorn startup in India. The startup raised $400 million in a Series E round of funding, raising its valuation to $2.5 billion in February 2022.

Is Uniphore an Indian company?

Uniphore is an Indian company, founded by Umesh Sachdev and Ravi Saraogi with dual headquarters in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India and Palo Alto, California, USA.

December 6, 2024

The Idea, Strategy, And Approaches Behind the Success of Verloop.io

The internet has empowered customer expectations and the boom in the service industry has to bring new tech-based applications to meet them. Conversational AI is a cost-efficient solution for all businesses to enhance customer service. For all businesses, from small-to-medium businesses to large enterprises, it reduces the staffing cost in the customer service department and improves customer satisfaction. AI-based solutions better understand the customers and offer relevant content that’s tailored to their personality. It helps in customized marketing to drive conversion.

Verloop.io is a Conversational AI platform to automate customer support. Here are the insights into the idea behind starting Verloop.ai and the growth strategy they have adopted for making it successful.

The insights are shared by Mr. Gaurav Singh, CEO & Founder, Verloop.io.

Why did you decide to go with the idea of chatbot?

At Verloop.io, we wanted to answer the fundamental question companies were asking at that time – how they could increase their profitability by providing better customer support. We realized that customer support as a category had been underserved by technology. While there were various tools available for marketing and sales, this segment was not getting the attention it deserved. Additionally, the technology developed for Customer Support till that time was mostly internal-facing/ process optimization – ticketing, QA sampling, etc. None of them enabled brands to build delightful customer experiences. We strongly believed that we could add value to the partner brands and help them offer a superlative experience to their customers.

Seven Years, How has been the journey so far? One big challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?

It has been an interesting journey for us so far to become the world’s leading customer support automation platform that enables businesses to deliver delightful support experiences to their customers across channels. During this time, we helped brands to effortlessly, and accurately scale up their customer support in a secure manner. More than 5,000 brands globally, including Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, Nykaa, Decathlon, Dar Al Arkan, Fetchr, DSP Mutual Fund, Rentomojo, and Scripbox are using our platform. Currently, our messaging layer can handle over 100k concurrent connections and can process over 4.3 million messages per second. We started our journey with just handful of employees and today our team has over 110 members.

One big challenge that we faced when we were starting out was that at that time, the awareness around Conversational AI enabling customer support teams was very limited. Most brands were unaware of Conversational AI and perceived it as a simple FAQ answering chatbots. Therefore, we had to build awareness and show them the value that we offered so that they understand the difference between Conversational AI and a simple FAQ or IVR bot.

Startup Learnings from a Serial Entrepreneur, Gaurav Singh

Gaurav Singh (Founder & CEO, Verloop.io) shares his entrepreneurial journey & highlights some of the startup learnings he picked in this journey.

StartupTalkyJeenal Jain

How did you go about finding your first customer and product-market fit?

Like they say, finding our first customer is the most challenging. More than customers these also become your design partners and give critical feedback to shape the product in a way that the market does respond to. On our journey, we were blessed to have some great brands that gave us multiple inputs and validated our product features that helped us achieve PMF.

What are the different channels you use to generate leads? Please share any one growth hack which gives the most ROI?

We have a multichannel marketing campaign running that ensures we are able to have multiple touchpoints in our potential user’s journey. We run campaigns right from the top of the funnel (awareness) to the bottom of the funnel and even post-acquisition.

One growth hacks is to identify who truly is your audience is when it comes to generating leads.

Approaching enterprise clients, SMEs, and startups, requires a whole different strategy. Could you please share some tips for the same?

As you have mentioned, these are very different customers, and the buying process also differs. We have different playbooks across Product, Marketing & Sales for these. Our enterprise playbook is heavily relationship and outbound dependent while for the SME and startups is focused more on the inbound side.

What are a few KPIs you track for the company? How do you measure the performance of your bots?

Conversational AI Chatbots

For different brands, there are different KPIs that we follow. With Verloop.io, brands are able to answer data-driven queries without interfacing with customer support. It also enables human agents to access all information from a single platform. By doing this, businesses are not only able to resolve a larger number of queries but also increase agent efficiency through historical and contextual customer information.

Brands that have adopted Verloop.io have experienced a 2x jump in their Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT) and a 5x increase in the agent effectiveness within 3-6 months. There was also a significant drop in calls as automation deflected a lot of queries. This has resulted in annualized cost savings of more than $1 billion across our clients.

Could you please share some metrics on growth numbers and revenue metrics?

In 2020, Verloop.io leapfrogged to become one of the biggest chat automation processors in India. Continuing on the growth journey in 2021, we have increased our customer base by 5X this year. We have gained from experiences and continue to enable businesses to deliver delightful support experiences to their customers in multiple languages. At the same time, we offer an omnichannel approach so all our partners can offer a unified customer experience to their customers.

In terms of volumes, Verloop.io is now powering more than a million conversations on a daily basis across various platforms. During the course of this year, we have also set up offices in UAE, Singapore, and South Africa to be closer to our clientele while we make our solution available for customers worldwide.

How do you make decisions on partnership?

When we look for partnership, we look at two things. One is how well the partner is respected and trusted by its customers and secondly is there a true value being created when Verloop.io and the partner join hands. This has helped us in screening out the noise and focussing on the partners we believe can unlock tremendous value in terms of growth and reach not only for Verloop.io but for the end customer as well.

What’s your strategy to hire the right candidate?

As an organization, we believe that if you hire the right set of folks and treat them right, they will take care of your business/customers. While we are super focused on the skills we need to hire for, we look for the right fitment in terms of our values and our working culture.

Being a funded company, what would you advise the founders who are looking to raise funds?

I believe in the initial days itself the founders should have a clear idea of who they will be targeting. Another approach that I recommend to fellow founders is that rather than looking at pleasing all, they should focus on their product and how they can better it. This is essential, especially in the initial days. Instead of obsessing over the competition, or what competitors are doing, they should focus on the value add that they can bring to the table. Rather than spending time chasing VC, founders should invest it in increasing their top lines. If the foundation of the start-up is solid then there will have no dearth of people wanting to invest in it.

What are a few new areas where conversational AI tools will be used? Do you think, Is it possible to completely replace customer support with conversational AI?

Conversational AI makes perfect business sense for all B2C companies. At Verloop.io we have been focusing on industries where there are large volumes of pre-sales and post-sales support required. This typically includes retail businesses, e-Commerce, banking, financial, insurance, edTech, food-tech, travel, and logistics amongst many others.

In the last 10 years, there have been significant improvements in the natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning technologies that has given new amplitude to simulate human conversation and dialogues. To delight the customer, achieve excellent Net Promoter Scores and reduce their customer service cost, businesses too are investing heavily in innovating ideas.

With the prevalence of chatbots and customers becoming more amenable to talking to bots, voice-based bots are becoming the new mainstream. As advancements in NLP continue, chatbots will only get smarter and have more human-like interactions.

More than replacing, Conversational AI chatbots are designed to work in conjunction with the existing systems. The chatbots enable the system to get more efficient by handling a greater number of queries in a reduced time and cost. The focus here is to ensure that only escalations are passed on to human executives.

What’s your opinion about the Indian SaaS market in 2022?

The SaaS business is booming in India. A report by McKinsey and SaasBoomi has predicted that this industry will be worth $1 trillion by 2030 and India’s share to double by that time.

In my opinion, the Indian SaaS market is just starting up. With the recent funding(s), acquisitions, and listing, SaaS is now entering the growth phase in India. While typically India SaaS has sold to clientele outside India, this year will see a lot of Indian businesses engaging with Indian SaaS products. These are driven by SaaS organizations investing in better product leadership, great customer experience, and the advantage of being at the cutting edge of technology.

March 4, 2022