The Tech Panda list of 7 AI startups of the month

The Tech Panda takes a look at seven AI startups that are doing interesting stuff with AI.

As AI slowly infuses each industry, the world becomes a different place for everyone. While some fear losing their jobs, other rejoice ease of work.

As Wellfound (formerly AngelList Talent) says, “Depending on where you sit, AI’s growing influence on just about every industry imaginable is either scary or exhilarating—and for many it’s both.”

Recently, AI has entered an unexpected industry, art. According to The Atlantic, it comes in the form of text-to-image AI applications, which apply expansive databases of existing imagery to transform a written prompt into a new image. The most known is DALL-E 2 from OpenAI, but this segment also includes Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

Some of the products are breath taking, whether with alarm at a world where human artists have no jobs or with amazement at how accurate the results are. Lawyers are concerned too about copyright infringement.

Considering so many AI developments, The Tech Panda takes a look at seven AI startups that are doing interesting stuff with AI.

ORAI

ORAI is an all-in-one Conversational AI, customer acquisition platform enabling clients to gain higher revenues & increased ROI using humanised virtual assistant enabling realtime 3-way communication, and automated lead qualification. It charges one time integration fee and a monthly subscription fee based on usage scale. 

The customer, retailer or distributor needs to just initiate the chat, and all the responses are integrated and automated over WhatsApp chat from a business verified WhatsApp account

Its platform is also integrated with CRM (Salesforce) and ERP (SAP), hence any information customer, retailer, distributor is looking for is just a WhatsApp message away, like payment details, quotations, outstanding summary, order status etc. Now the customer, retailer or distributor needs to just initiate the chat, and all the responses are integrated and automated over WhatsApp chat from a business verified WhatsApp account. With the current solution, almost 30% of the load is reduced for their call centre teams.

Philosophy

AI driven chatbot has witnessed an upsurge in demand as it helps business to grow and function holistically. The global conversational AI market size is expected to grow from USD 4.8 billion in 2020 to USD 13.9 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 21.9% during the forecast period. 

ORAI acts as a strong enterprise solution for a variety of use cases. The engagement ratio of the digital user has gone up by min 200% as the customers are reached on new-age channels like WhatsApp, Google Assistant and Alexa.

Growth Story

ORAI currently has 100+ customers including Sayaji Hotel, GMR Delhi, Group Landmark, Kataria Group, Emcure etc. The platform has helped businesses to Increase qualified leads and accelerate business revenue. Also, it provides 24×7 access to information, handles client queries more effectively and improves customer acquisition and retention.

LimeChat 

Founded in 2020, LimeChat is developing a conversational marketing eco-system to help D2C brands improve retention. It delivers tangible impact for D2C brands and consumers alike by creating the most compelling user experiences using the power of human-level AI chatbots.

LimeChat was conceived with the mission to help brands leverage conversational mediums and powerful automations to create the most compelling user experiences

LimeChat’s assistant lets the brand instantly respond to customer queries throughout the buying journey, from product discovery to checkout to returns. Its WhatsApp Retention Campaigns help brands engage customers on WhatsApp at critical points in their buying journey, from abandoned checkout to feedback to win-back of existing users. This allows brands to increase campaign conversions by 3x, reduce support workloads by 70%, and improve customer satisfaction.

Origin

It was founded in 2020 by Aniket Bajpai and Nikhil Gupta. Gupta says,‘’Despite spending a lot of energy, human resources and capital, some stellar brands miss out on delivering quality customer experience and support. LimeChat was conceived with the mission to help brands leverage conversational mediums and powerful automations to create the most compelling user experiences. Our growing client base stands testimony to the impact we have been able to generate for businesses.”

Philosophy

D2C as a category has witnessed explosive growth in the last few years. Pairing this with the opportunity that WhatsApp poses for brands to leverage as a commercial channel can create exceptional customer experiences.

Some of India’s top brands have already seen an increase in sales and reduction in customer support costs and response times by leveraging the sophisticated NLP engine developed by LimeChat.

Growth Story

Trusted by over 125+ of India’s biggest D2C brands like MamaEarth and Wow Skin Science, its mission is to help brands deliver amazing buying experiences for the end consumer. Its marquee products include: A Human-level eComm Chatbot, Whatsapp Marketing Campaigns, and an eComm Helpdesk. While the bigger players have created industry-agnostic solutions, LimeChat’s specialisation in D2C eComm conversations makes them one of the most advanced tools available for D2C brands across categories.

In the last 6 months, LimeChat has witnessed a 3X growth and has expanded its client base to over 125 brands in India / across the globe including Mamaearth, MCaffeine, Wow Skin Science to name a few.

Observe.AI

Observe.AI is an Intelligent Workforce Platform that transforms contact centers by embedding AI into customer conversations, optimizing agent performance, and automating repeatable processes that drive revenue and retention. With Observe.AI, contact centers can surface intelligence across every interaction, giving employees highly accurate, actionable feedback using baked-in coaching and evaluation workflows, and improve key business metrics across every customer touchpoint. 

Observe.AI has risen to meet this unprecedented crossroads for the contact center industry, in which a massive market is undergoing once-in-a-generation transformation and investment in the right technologies will make or break business outcomes

It transforms how contact centers operate as AI-empowered systems of intelligence, with full conversation visibility, business-improving insights, and machine-driven workflows. By surfacing intelligence from every customer interaction, Observe.AI acts as a force multiplier, boosting performance of customer-facing teams and automating repeatable processes that exceed business goals. The net effect is stellar customer experiences, top performing teams, and unprecedented business results.

Swapnil Jain, Co-Founder and CEO of Observe.AI, says, “Observe.AI has risen to meet this unprecedented crossroads for the contact center industry, in which a massive market is undergoing once-in-a-generation transformation and investment in the right technologies will make or break business outcomes.”

Philosophy

In the contact center industry, consumer expectations and technology investments are at an all-time high, yet brands struggle to improve customer experience and business outcomes. While $24 billion has been poured into technology investments, contact centers remain woefully in the dark when it comes to customer conversations. At most, typical contact centers have just 3% visibility into these interactions, leaving their customer-facing teams with no option but to work reactively and inconsistently – and leading to an estimated $75 billion per year in lost revenue.

Observe.AI has a transformative vision to deliver actionable and trustworthy AI that empowers digital-first businesses to create exceptional customer experiences.

Growth Story

It is trusted by hundreds of customers and partners, including ResMed, Pearson, 23andMe, Accolade, Group 1 Automotive, and Southeast Trans. Backed by Softbank Vision Fund 2, Zoom, Menlo Ventures, Next47, NGP Capital, Emergent Ventures, Scale Ventures, Nexus Ventures, and Y-Combinator, Observe.AI is headquartered in San Francisco with an office in Bangalore, India.

In September 2020, the company raised $54M in a Series B Funding round led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Next47 Ventures and NGP Capital. On the heels of announcing 300% year-over-year revenue growth, Observe.AI made its entry into the omnichannel market with its acquisition of Scope.AI in August 2021.

In March 2022, Observe.AI announced continued record growth for its fiscal year, including nearly 150% increased ARR and increased customer base of $100K or more by 125% year-over-year. This propelled a substantial uptick in usage of the Observe.AI platform, including 3X increase in volume of customer interactions analyzed with its AI engine, 426% increase in AI-powered agent evaluations, and 201% increase in AI-powered agent coaching sessions.

EXPERTIA AI

EXPERTIA AI offers a one click hiring solution to SMEs helping them automatically source and identify top 10 candidates from a pool of applicants invited from 25 plus job boards. Businesses are encouraged to connect their company website with their Expertia Career Page to collect all applicants to a smart centralized talent pool, helping them find relevant profiles across all open positions instantaneously.

Our vision is to become a global skill cloud offering real time hiring as a service to businesses worldwide

The HR Tech SaaS platform operates a Freemium model, offering unlimited sourcing and screening of candidates to startups for free with premium opt-in features for larger organizations under paid subscriptions.

Kanishk Shukla, Co-founder and CEO, said, “Our vision is to become a global skill cloud offering real time hiring as a service to businesses worldwide. Our first solution tailored for the SMEs is an AI powered virtual recruiter which uses proprietary algorithms, metadata and platform integrations to organically source and deliver top 10 job applicants within a few hours. The larger businesses however could access this intelligence as a service by integrating their ATS with Expertia AI and receive realtime fit – not fit recommendations for incoming job applications and alerts notifying them of qualified passive candidates in their historical pool of applicants”.

Origin

EXPERTIA AI was founded in 2021 by Akshay Gugnani, Research Scholar from IBM and MIT and serial entrepreneur Shukla, who successfully exited Koovs.com post its listing on AIM/ LSE.

Philosophy

The future of work will be defined by how companies hire and retain talent in the post-pandemic world. There is an urgent need for companies to hire better candidates sooner.

Expertia AI can bring an AI-powered platform to the world, delivering the best match between candidates and opportunities through automated extraction and matching of skills and we are excited to partner with them. Its AI-enabled ATS platform helps attract quality employees in less time.

Growth Story

Expertia AI today has over 500 companies, 1000 recruiters and over 100k professionals actively using the platform to automate sourcing of qualified candidates and relevant jobs.

It’s targeting 100 job board integrations in FY 23 up from 25 currently and improve the accuracy of our top talent recommendation up from 75% to 85% by the end of the year surpassing the abilities of a trained recruiter. It will also focus on acquiring and employing publicly available meta data at scale to help us go beyond what is written in a job description and resume, understand business needs and hiring preferences and offer curated candidates for higher conversion and retention.

Operating in the Future of Work domain, the company intends to capture a slice of the over $500 billion annual spend on recruitment and associated technology done by businesses globally. Later in the year Expertia AI has plans to offer skill advisory solutions to business’ employees helping companies reskill, upskill, retain professionals and close the $8.5 trillion skill gap globally.

Convin.ai

Convin’s platform provides businesses with powerful tools to solve key challenges, increase in conversion rates, sales process observability, conversational intelligence, and enhanced customer experience among others.  

Assisted selling will stay & become even more crucial for enabling better conversions & great customer experiences

Durgesh Choudhary, Co-founder & CPO, says, “Assisted selling will stay & become even more crucial for enabling better conversions & great customer experiences.”

Origin

Convin was founded in 2021 in Bengaluru IIT Delhi alumni Ashish Santhalia (CEO), Bharat Patidar (COO), Atul Shree (CTO), and Durgesh Choudary (CPO). While working with industry leaders across BFSI, EdTech, healthcare, real estate, travel & hospitality domains, they witnessed first-hand the growing need for a holistic platform that allows customers to interact at multiple channels in different ways, automates conversation analysis, assists agents to sell better, improves agent productivity and enhances end-customer experiences. Convin has since helped global companies across verticals with its’ platform to improve sales.

Philosophy

Disruptive events of the last 2 years have accelerated SalesTech adoption – remote virtual selling, distributed sales teams & an expanding array of digital customer touchpoints. AI’s progress and sales teams uncovering gaps in the current tech stack have led to the emergence of a new category of SalesTech. Convin’s deep technical expertise and product thinking clarity support this.

Growth Story

It received pre-seed funding from Titan Capital and 9Unicorns back in June 2021. 

Zipteams

Zipteams enables sales & customer success teams with intelligent meeting rooms to have engaging & fruitful customer conversations and store those in one place.  These meeting rooms are powered with automatic identification of next steps for sales follow-up routines, self-guided nudges for sales teams to onboard and get trained faster on the job and a complete repository of customer meetings to keep all their context in one place.

It uses AI to make customer conversations more contextual, engaging, and fruitful by enabling sales teams to bring the right data points to their customers at the moment of need.

We aim to empower inside sales and customer success teams with a platform to unlock value from the massive data that is being generated in their daily customer conversations

Siddhartha Srivastava, Founder, Zipteams, said, “The proportion of inside vs outside sales teams is continuously growing over the past few years (45.5% now). In fact, the inside sales teams are growing 15X faster than the outside sales team. However, in this virtual, hybrid setup, there is a considerable demand for advanced technologies to assist the teams to deliver high performance in virtual customer meetings, consistently. With Zipteams, we aim to empower inside sales and customer success teams with a platform to unlock value from the massive data that is being generated in their daily customer conversations. We are already seeing great traction for the product and are continuously growing our waitlist and user base significantly week on week.”

Philosophy

Sales teams today depend on CRMs for the context and data about the customers, however, today they are more constrained than enabled with the CRMs because of the manual nature of data entry in them. Zipteams will make the $145 bn CRM investments more worthy by automatically capturing customer data right at the source where the conversations are happening.

Growth Story

Zipteams has successfully completed a 6 monthbeta testing of the product and witnessed rampant growth in adoption across Edutech, IT, and SaaS industries. The team is now focused on expanding the use cases for sales and customer success teams across other sectors as well.

Its next product upgrades will focus on advancing their NLP language models to capture nuanced customer intents. This will enhance the organization’s ability to provide real-time revenue intelligence nudges to sales teams while they are actively interacting with their customers on a call.

Scalenut

Scalenut, focusing primarily on the US and the UK markets, helps businesses and brands plan, research and create content in 1/5th the time it normally takes. In addition, it reduces costs by 90% and significantly scales up content production. Its AI platform brings everything needed by them to one place so they can strategize and scale easily and at a pace that helps them achieve business goals.

With Scalenut, we aim to empower the SEO and content teams to put the paddle on their organic marketing efforts from a single platform and help businesses grow sustainably

Scalenut’s Co-founder Mayank Jain says, “With Scalenut, we aim to empower the SEO and content teams to put the paddle on their organic marketing efforts from a single platform and help businesses grow sustainably.”

Origin

Scalenut was founded by Jain, Gaurav Goyal, and Saurabh Wadhawan. In early 2022, they launched their AI-powered SEO and content marketing platform for public use.

Philosophy

As per a Databox study, almost 20% of marketers get more than 60% of their traffic from search engines i.e. organic traffic, and 71% of the marketers said that creating new content is their most important tactic for growing their organic traffic.

“The pandemic spurred rapid digitization across businesses, with a greater emphasis being placed on digital marketing. However, after spending a huge amount of money on paid advertising for growth, they realized that it is not sustainable in the long run and therefore, there has been an increased focus on organic marketing to grow sustainably.

“In order to increase organic growth, SEO and content marketing teams juggle multiple tools for sound SEO research, content creation, optimization, and performance measurement. Not only is it inefficient, but it also leads to siloed team efforts based on broken insights and incomplete strategy. This is why most businesses struggle to scale content marketing successfully,” says Jain.

Growth Story

The SaaS platform helps SMBs and mid-market businesses to scale content and grow sustainably through organic marketing. Other than thousands of SMBs across the world, Scalenut also counts leading enterprises like Snapdeal, PharmEasy, Foyr, Hubilo, and Mosaic Wellness as its clients.

According to Scalenut founders, businesses associated with it have witnessed 3x growth in their organic traffic in just 3-4 months. It has seen 10x growth in revenue in the last six months and are also trending at a seven-digit revenue run rate right now.