Morph the bot puts customer on the top
This Tech30 startup is going after the enterprise market in India as Gartner predicts that customer relationship software will be a $36 billion industry by the end of 2017.
When you click on a Yes Bank advertisement on the web, a friendly bot opens up and talks to the customer: “What are you looking for?” When the customer says, “A fixed deposit with the highest interest rate?”, the bot figures out the customer’s need. It says, for example, “We have a savings rate that offers seven percent and the product allows access to other banking services.” In a matter of minutes, the enterprise can either call the customer and/or close the sale of the product on the bot itself. Then to top it off, the bot analyses the transactions of the day and constantly improves its ability of winning the customer. This bot is Morph.AI and it is powered by Pratik Jain, Abhishek Gupta, Niyati Agarwal and Vipul Garg who were heavily influenced by machine learning classes at college. The Morph.AI bot helps corporate make sense of data generated on their Facebook and other social media channels.
Pratik Jain, Abhishek Gupta, Niyati Agarwal and Vipul Garg entered the world of entrepreneurship at the age of 24 when most individuals want to stay put in their day jobs. Pratik, Abhishek and Vipul were batchmates and became friends, thanks to their consecutive roll numbers, in 2011 at the DAIICT in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. They belonged to middle-class families that were into trading and manufacturing. “We became interested in AI and machine learning because of our professors at DAIICT. Under their influence, we believed that we could become entrepreneurs,” says Pratik Jain, Co-founder, Morph.AI.
It all started in 2015 when the three of them — Abhishek, Pratik and Vipul — got picked up by the social media management company Sprinkr to be part of their founding R&D team in India. That’s how they got to know Niyati, who also worked for that organisation, and their friendship turned into a full-blown entrepreneurship idea in March 2016.
Their company’s growth began with the global craze for the cartoon character, Pokemon Go, in mid-2016. The founders built a bot to answer queries on how to use the augmented reality platform for fun and they hosted it on their Facebook page. The bot went viral and soon the company had 20 million queries transacted by it. Just when they were ending that bot’s life cycle, the marketing agency of Manchester City Football Club was impressed with Morph.AI’s Pokemon Go bot. They immediately reached them and asked them to build a bot for the Manchester City Football Club to manage fan queries on Facebook and the website.
The four of them matched Manchester City’s requirements, which was answering fan queries on tickets, schedules and stadium platooning, and the bot they built for this went live by the end of 2016. “This work started winning us clients,” says Abhishek. In a matter of six months, they had eight paying clients and nine clients piloting the product. The company works on a SAAS model by charging on a transaction basis.
Morph.AI has invested Rs 30 lakh and has raised angel money (undisclosed). It hopes to become the largest query platform for enterprises and offer a data analytics dashboard and visualisation platform along with the bot. Its competition and senior peers are Yellow Messenger and Marvin.AI. The company also competes with SAP funded niki.ai.
“If there are paying customers, any startup must figure out its market dynamics. Only then will the company scale and thrive,” says V. Ganapathy, CEO of Axilor Ventures.
Following are Morph. AI’s achievements:
- It helps a business personalise its marketing using conversations.
- It boasts a conversion rate of 5x.
- It claims that Estee Lauder, the fashion giant, closed 8x conversions in their campaign.
- Its clients include Yes Bank, Yamaha, Manchester City Football Club among a total of 17 clients.
