Silicon Valley-based startup incubator Y Combinator has invested in Mumbai-based intelligent SMS app Kyte.ai. This investment is part of its summer cohort. It invests ₹82.3 lakhs ($120,000) in startups for a 7% equity across two batches every year. The funds raised will be used to scale the technology team behind the app.
Kyte.ai was launched by Ravish Naresh, former Housing.com co-founder, in 2018. The smart app uses a machine learning algorithm to filter spam and lets the users experience only the relevant information.
“It is intended for the Indian market where SMS is the primary mode of communication for finance and commerce transactions and 60% of messages are spam. SMS alerts usage in India has exploded over the last three years and spam remains an unsolved problem,” said Ravish Naresh, co-founder of Kyte.ai.
Talking about the app, Tim Brady, partner, Y Combinator, said, “Kyte is attacking a problem that we don’t see in the US, but is prominent in India. We are excited to work with them because they have a strong, technical founding team with great product design instincts.”
Kyte.ai is equipped with additional features along with a spam filter, like Passbook, it helps the users to track their spending, fetch their mini-statements, and bank balance just using the SMS. Its smart UI provides the users with the updated regarding relevant information like ticket bookings, online transactions, and OTP on a priority basis.
Launched two months back, the startup claims to have over 100,000 downloads for the app.
Kyte.ai’s investor Y Combinator is a Silicon Valley-based seed accelerator that provides funding to startups during their early phase. It helps startups with their ideas, along with helping the founders deal with investors and acquirers.
The accelerator has funded for 1,900 companies since its inception in 2005, with a combined valuation of the companies being over $100 billion.
Some of the prominent startups funded by the accelerator include Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Weebly, Coinbase, send text message, among many others.