Yellow Messenger, a leading omnichannel conversational AI tool, based out of Bengaluru, has raised $4 million (₹27 crore) in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures Partners and angel investors. The round also includes participants such as Phanindra Sama, founder, Redbus and CIO of Telangana; Kashyap Deorah, founder of Hypertrack; Anand Swaminathan, senior partner, McKinsey & Co.; Prashant Malik, cofounder, Limeroad; Nishant Rao, former MD, Linkedin India; Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, cofounders, Snapdeal; Monisha Varadan, Zephyr Ventures and Alap Bharadwaj, APAC Innovation, Google.
The AI-based company will be using the infuse funds toward research and development. It will also invest in development cutting-edge deep tech capabilities, and expand its customer success teams and presence in high-potential markets across Asia, the Middle East, and other emerging markets.
Dev Khare, partner at Lightspeed Ventures said, “We believe that Asia’s businesses require fundamentally different solutions for enterprise software, driven by unique organisational structures and consumer expectations, Yellow Messenger is tapping into the messaging-centric expectation that Asia’s 4.5 Bn consumers have for interacting with large consumer companies in verticals such as banking, financial services, utilities, travel, and ecommerce.”
Founded in 2016 by Raghu Ravinutala, Rashid Khan and Jaya Kishore Reddy, Yellow Messenger deploys artificial intelligence (AI) to help some of the world’s largest enterprises reach and engage with customers conversationally, and through myriad ways.
Prior to this round, the company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in 2016. The startups has been incubated at startup accelerators Microsoft Accelerator and SAP Startup Studio.
The company leverages its natural language processing technology that seamlessly understands over 130 languages including English, Hindi, Bahasa, Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin, and Arabic.
At present, it is operating across more than 10 industry verticals including retail, travel & hospitality, banking, insurance, pharma and healthcare, energy, and consumer goods.
Yellow Messenger competes with the players such as Haptik, which was recently acquired by Reliance Jio. Haptik cofounder and CEO Aakrit Vaish has written that the conversational AI world has come a long way from being just a novelty item for businesses to being a feature with actual, substantial quantitative and qualitative advantages.
Its clients include the likes of Unilever, AXA, AIG, Bajaj Finance, HDFC Bank, Asian Paints, Dr. Reddy labs, and Concentrix.