Coinbase acquires Bengaluru-based conversational AI startup Agara

Coinbase, the US-based cryptocurrency exchange, has acquired Bengaluru and New York-based Agara Labs, an AI-powered conversational technology startup, for an undisclosed value.

A blog post from Coinbase read, “We plan to leverage Agara’s powerful deep learning and conversational AI technology to automate and enhance our customer experience (CX) tools. Improving our CX remains a top priority for Coinbase in the past few months we have increased our support staff headcount by 5x and announced that we’ll deliver 24x7 phone support and live messaging by end of the year.”

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Coinbase has already announced plans to expand in India as it looks to build its technology hub in the country. As the blog post noted, “In addition to Agara’s technology, the Agara team brings deep expertise in ML and NLP to Coinbase and will augment our existing product, engineering, and data teams.”

Coinbase has also backed the two crypto unicorns from India – CoinSwitch Kuber and CoinDCX.

Founded by Abhimanyu Singh and Arjun Maheswaran in 2017, Agara develops virtual voice agents that leverage proprietary machine learning models to understand intentions in speech, make intelligent decisions to handle queries, and talk individual customers through to a resolution.

Agara, in less than four years, has six patents (filed in the USA) under its belt. The ML/AI-based system patents have been developed by Agara’s team to help its voice agents understand, classify and summarise language. For instance, one of their patents in ‘Controlled Natural Language Generation’ allows their voice agents to create meaningful dialogues without any human intervention.

In February this year, Agara had announced a $4.3 million pre-Series A extension round of funding led by UTEC, a Japan-based early-stage deeptech venture capital firm. The round also saw participation from existing investors Blume Ventures and RTP Global.

This funding round bought the total funds raised by Agara to $7.5 million, and included investors like Kleiner Perkins.