Agara Labs, a startup applying Deep Learning to speech and text to automate customer support, has come out of stealth with pre-Series A funding of $2.5 million from Blume Ventures and RTP Global. The company already counts Silicon Valley bluechip Kleiner Perkins as a seed investor.
Agara Labs automates end-to-end customer support operations for even the most complex kinds of queries. It achieves this by training sophisticated Deep Learning models on over 10 million historical customer support queries and other proprietary data sources.
The company is currently working with large service providers like AWS and Genesys etc.
The company’s flagship product, Sia, is a fully autonomous phone support agent which can directly field calls with customers and handle their problems just the way a human agent would. Sia is among the first fully autonomous voice bots in the world.
The company also operates BlueDot which is an autonomous email support agent. It can understand, auto-classify, extract important information and respond to the customer with or without assistance from a human agent.
“We intend to remove the dreaded experience of being put on hold as a customer,” said Abhimanyu, co-founder of Agara Labs. “By harnessing cutting-edge deep learning technology and massive volumes of data, we are turning customer support into a pleasurable and satisfying experience for everyone.”
With its focus on research, the firm is also exploring collaborations with Indian academia to help its contributions reach a wider audience.
Over the past year and half, the company has focused on developing, testing and deploying its technology and products. It already counts among its customers the largest consumer products companies in the world and powers all of their email support in North America and the United Kingdom.
Starting in June 2019, it will power their phone support as well. The company has successfully processed over 250,000 queries and is on track to handle well over two million support requests this year.
With this round of funding, the company is coming out of stealth mode. It intends to use the funds to continue its product development and establish a sales team in North America. It is also planning to acquire high-performance computing machines to strengthen its product development.
Sanjay Nath, the Managing Partner at Blume Ventures, said, “Agara Labs’ seasoned technical team and focus on ‘deep tech for global markets’ fits in well with our new fund’s focus areas. They have created competitive technology from an India-based team, targeted at a demanding global audience of Fortune 500 enterprises.”
Kirill Kozhevnikov, Partner of RTP Global, said, “We are happy to back one of the most tech-savvy teams in India in the Machine Learning vertical. Agara Labs has built a top-tier tech solution, validated by multinational enterprise companies, and a product with significant scalability potential.”
Agara Labs was founded in 2017 by Abhimanyu, former VP of Product at Stayzilla, Arjun Maheswaran, former Staff Data Scientist at Twitter and Dr. Pankaj Gupta, former Head of Personalization and Recommendations at Twitter and Chief Product & Technology Officer at Stayzilla. (Pankaj has since moved on to become Director of Engineering at Google.)