CHENNAI: Chennai-based Software as a Service (SaaS) start-ups like Uniphore and Freshworks have been seeing a steady growth in recent years and are now hoping to enter the Unicorn club.
Speech recognition software company Uniphore’s journey began with seed funding from Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, in 2008. Backed by IT veterans like Cisco’s John Chambers and Kris Gopalakrishnan from Infosys, the company now expects to reach $1 billion in valuation in the next 3-4 years due to an overhaul in its operations in the US.
The company says it has hired 25 senior professionals in its San Jose office to manage sales and marketing of its speech analytics product AuMina. However, it plans to retain nearly 90 per cent of its workforce in India.
“While Alexa, Siri and Cortana are business to consumer products, Akeira and AuMina, our bots, are for business to business. Akeira has the potential to replace high-cost human call centres and also give directives or rectify customer complaints in less than one and a half minutes”, said Umesh Sachdev, co-founder & CEO, Uniphore.
“AI-powered AuMina is currently our flagship product and contributes to about 70 per cent of our total revenue, it can recognise unstructured conversations in nearly 17 Indian languages, native dialects and a total of 100 languages internationally. Out of the 52 million calls that call centres receive globally, nearly 20-25 per cent are catered to from India.
We see India as a huge market, but our stakes in the US are higher due to demand for B2B chatbots,” he added. “Our revenue has been growing 100 per cent over the last three years. We expect it to reach 300-400 per cent growth and clock $1 billion valuation in the next 3-4 years,” Umesh says.