How this AI startup founded by IIT alumni landed Delhivery as its first client, Bhavesh Manglani as seed investor

The year was 2019. IIT Delhi alumni and couple entrepreneurs Rashi and Manish Gupta were building Rezo.ai, a Noida-based startup that leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to enhance the customer experience for enterprises using little human intervention. 

During a networking session at a startup conference, they chanced upon a fellow entrepreneur who pointed out that Delhivery was looking for a similar service. 

“I sent a message to Bhavesh Manglani (Co-founder, Delhivery) on LinkedIn and he was kind enough to get on a call to understand what we bring to the table. One thing led to another, he threw some time-bound challenges, liked our energy, approach and our solution, and we landed Delhivery as a client,” Manish recalls. 

Leading a small team of just four people at the time, the duo says they understood the value of gaining the first client and ensured them round the clock service, should there be any concerns from Delhivery's operations team. 

Onboarding Delhivery as its first client not only helped them find the product-market fit, but also paved the way to solve Rezo.ai’s long-standing challenge of raising funds. 

“There was a time when we connected with many people in the VC world and the industry. They were not ready to buy our vision and did not believe there was a market opportunity for us, and that was the biggest challenge. Many investors shot us down big time,” Manish recalls.

Now, Bhavesh Manglani is one of the investors to participate in the startup’s seed round of funding (an undisclosed amount)  announced last week. Other investors include Modulor Capital, Dexter Angel Network, Veda, and Devesh Sachdev – who is the Founder of Fusion Microfinance.

“We have now started conversations for the next round of funding as well but it is too early to disclose anything,” Manish adds.

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How Rezo.ai works

Rezo.ai leverages a host of modern technologies to simplify customer engagement and problem resolution for enterprises. This includes a combination of deep learning and natural language processing to understand and interpret a customer’s language and intent. Interactions are further streamlined with AI automation, which the startup claims, has reduced resolution time by 70 percent. 

Considering that artificial intelligence is a system trained with data, it becomes important to understand what kind of data is being fed to Rezo.ai that enables it to cut across healthcare, education, insurance, logistics and diagnostics industries. 

Rashi explains, “Rezo.ai can be imagined as a virtual agent who will be given the same info that a human agent is given when they join an organisation. Besides that, the client organisation can give roughly two to three months' volume of data and no additional information needs to be generated for our sake.” 

“The system is built intelligent enough to handle all sorts of data and make a map for a particular client. That is why we can roll out everywhere; Rezo can talk as per what the brand wants,” she adds.

This is further diversified with a unique offering of more than 100 regional and foreign languages, including Polish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, as well as Malayalam, Urdu, Odia, Marathi, Gujurati, among others. 

With a team of 30 people at the moment, Rezo.ai’s recent fundraise and the next expected round will be dedicated towards product enhancement and expanding the team. Manish says it has about 10 to 15 candidates in the hiring pipeline. “We are growing pretty fast but are keeping a close watch on the burn rate,” he adds.

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Being a woman entrepreneur

Rashi has a dual Master’s degree specialising in mathematics and computer applications from IIT Delhi. After completing PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), Rashi was involved with research work at several companies, including Absolutdata, before co-founding Rezo.ai in 2017.

However, despite being four years into entrepreneurship, Rashi says she still faces inherent biases while closing sales and marketing deals. 

"Recently, I was on a call and this person told me I should discuss with my husband and insisted on it about ten times. I had to tell him that I am taking the call and it is final. This happens a lot and that speaks volumes about the mind space they are coming from," she shares.

As far as Rezo.ai is concerned, the duo believes Rashi’s expertise in NLP and technology, coupled with Manish’s experience in product management, have always made them a strong team and will continue to power the startup’s growth.