Reliance Jio backed Haptik acquires conversational commerce platform Buzzo.ai
The company said in a statement that with the acquisition of Buzzo.ai, Haptik is all set to enable the next generation of advanced AI solutions for enterprises globally across customer care and commerce, a combined market size that is estimated to be more than $500 billion.
Haptik, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries and a conversational AI platform, on Tuesday announced that it has acquired Buzzo.ai, a Mumbai-based conversational commerce startup.
In a statement, the company said that Buzzo.ai, started in 2016 by serial entrepreneurs Anand Ramachandran and Vivek Arya, is a platform to create an expert advisor-like conversational shopping experience in any retail or e-commerce domains.
With the acquisition, Haptik will now be able to further enhance voice and chat commerce solutions for its customers globally, and leverage the platform to power multilingual experiences, it added.
“Over the last 18 months, we have been primarily focused on customer service AI solutions,” says Swapan Rajdev, Co-Founder & CTO of Haptik, which now processes more than 2 billion interactions.
Swapan Rajdev, CTO and Co-founder and Aakrit Vaish, CEO and Co-founder
“But given our mission to enable the paradigm shift from clicks to conversations, commerce was always the next frontier. The Buzzo.ai team has taken a very unique approach to solving this problem, which is totally different from what we have today. This is what attracted us to them, and then once we got to know the team better it was a no brainer.”
Buzzo.ai enables an AI assistant which can understand a customer's needs through natural conversation, offers relevant recommendations and explains why that may be the best choice. The AI assistant builds in-depth knowledge through available information like product details and customer reviews.
“We have been working in the areas of NLP, Text Processing, Semantic Search and Information Retrieval for more than 10 years,” said Anand Ramachandran, Co-founder of Buzzo.ai.
Anand's previous venture Makesense Technologies was a semantic search engine acquired by Naukri in 2013 for $1.5 million.
This acquisition comes on the heels of Haptik’s expansion to North America, where the startup acqui-hired the founding team of Convrg, a Los Angeles-based startup.
“As creators of technology, the only way to see the fruit of our work is with massive scale. And that’s what got us excited about Haptik, particularly after their alliance with Reliance Jio. They have been pioneers in this space for many years and we look forward to joining them on this journey,” Adds Vivek Arya, who along with Anand graduated from IIT Bombay in 2007.
In April 2019, Reliance Industries’ subsidiary Reliance Jio acquired a majority stake in Haptik in a $100 million deal. Its clients and partners include Samsung, Oyo Rooms, KFC, Coca-Cola, Tata Group, Club Mahindra and Zurich Insurance among others.
