John Chambers-backed Uniphore scores $38 Mn Series C round

Speech recognition startup Uniphore has scored $38 worth Series C round led by California-based venture capital firm March Capital Partners.

The round raised at an estimated valuation of $130 million also saw participation from National Grid Partners, Sistema Asia Fund and Patni Wealth Advisors and existing investor Chiratae Ventures.

The Chennai-based startup has raised a total of $37.9 million in two tranches on June 5 and June 24, reports ET via paper.vc.

This fresh capital is expected to be deployed towards research and development and building speech analytics and virtual assistant solution for global markets.

Founded by Ravi Saraogi and Umesh Sachdev in 2008, Uniphore develops solutions in speech analytics and virtual assistant verticals and has offices in Chennai, Bengaluru, Singapore, and Palo Alto.

In November 2017, Uniphore had picked up undisclosed Series B round led by Chiratae Ventures with participation from John Chambers, chairman of USISPF and executive chairman of Cisco.

Uniphore was also the first investment by John Chambers outside of the United States.

BayTalkitech, Hexolabs, Mihup and Voxta are some other notable startups in the segment. Another startup in this space Liv.Ai was acquired by Flipkart in August 2018. The e-commerce marketplace platform is targeting its arch-rival Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant to become a standalone shopping portal through the voice-based search option.

Of late, Google had launched a kids-focused speech recognition app Bolo. It aims to help young kids improve and expand their learning, comprehension, and vocabulary skills in Hindi and English.