Vernacular.ai secures $5.1 Mn in Series A round

Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup Vernacular.ai has secured $5.1 million in a Series A funding round led by Exfinity Ventures and IAN Fund. Kalaari Capital, AngelList, and LetsVenture also participated in the round. 

Vernacular.ai, which was also a part of Kalaari Capital's accelerator program Kstart, had scored an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Kstart Capital in 2017. 

As a part of the funding round, Roman Roy from IAN Fund will be joining the board of the startup. 

The company would utilize the fresh funds to expand its operations outside India and enter the markets of Southeast Asia and the US. Besides, it would also invest the funds to further enhance its proprietary artificial intelligence-based voice automation platform, said an ET report. 

Founded in 2016 by IIT Roorkee alumnus, Sourabh Gupta, and Akshay Deshraj, Vernacular.ai  provides an AI-based voice automation platform - VIVA that helps accelerate engagement strategy and utilizes speech recognition and natural language understanding (NLU) technology.

Another product of the platform is VASR (Vernacular Automated Sound Recognition) that enables enterprises to convert audio to text by applying powerful neural network models in an easy-to-use API. 

At present, the company claims to have achieved a 40-50% reduction in average handling time along with a 97% approval rate for smart suggestions. 

Last month, Vernacular.ai had revealed its strategy to keep the business on during the COVID-19 outbreak. According to the startup, it has taken proactive steps to control all unnecessary expenditures and reduce costs for the next six months to a year.