The funding will be used to accelerate product development, make strategic technology hires and expand into UK & Australia.
February 03, 2021:
Agara, the startup building the next generation of virtual voice agents for enterprises, today announced a $4.3 million Pre-Series A extension round led by
UTEC, a Japan based early stage deep-tech venture capital firm. The round also includes participation from existing investors
Blume Ventures and
RTP Global. This brings the total funds raised by Agara to $7.5m and includes bluechip investors Kleiner Perkins.
Founded by Abhimanyu and Arjun Maheswaran in 2017, Agara develops industry-leading virtual voice agents that leverage proprietary machine learning models to understand intentions in speech, make intelligent decisions to handle queries and talk individual customers through to a resolution.
Agara, in less than 4 years, has 6 patents (filed in USA) under its belt. The ML/ AI based system patents have been developed by Agara’s team to help its voice agents understand, classify and summarize to language. For instance, one of their patents in ‘Controlled Natural Language Generation’ allows their voice agents to create meaningful dialogs without any human intervention.
Headquartered at New York, Agara plans to double its team of ML research executives and data scientists in 2021. The company also plans to establish its first pure AI research team at Bangalore in 2021.
The funding will be used to accelerate product development and make number of strategic hires in Agara’s technology department as well as growing the sales & marketing team in North America.
Abhimanyu, Co-founder and CEO of Agara said: “Whether it is sales calls, phone support or product feedback, voice has been the top choice for companies around the globe. We strive to be pioneer in voice-first world. With the new Covid norms, we expect the demand for virtual voice agents rise manifold. Last year, we processed over a million calls and a million emails in 12 countries across every continent in 4 languages. With the new surge in demand, we are confident of increasing this number to over 5 million calls.”
Sanjay Nath at Blume Ventures said: “Autonomous voice has applications beyond customer support and can stretch across industries and functions. We at Blume believe the day isn’t very far where autonomous voice agents will be ubiquitous. The Agara team has showcased tremendous deeptech expertise in building a cutting edge product that has been validated by the likes of P&>. We are very excited to continue supporting the company and help make Agara synonymous with autonomous voice.”
Source: Business World
