Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot company Haptik, a subsidiary of Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd, announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Buzzo.ai, a Mumbai-based conversational commerce start-up. While the company did not disclose the size of the deal, sources said it was valued at $3-4 million.
This acquisition follows Haptik’s recent acqui-hiring of the founding team of Los Angeles-based AI startup, Convrg.
In a statement, the company said that Buzzo.ai, started in 2016 by entrepreneurs Anand Ramachandran and Vivek Arya, is a platform to create an expert advisor-like conversational shopping experience in retail or e-commerce.
Haptik will now be able to further enhance voice and chat commerce solutions, and leverage the platform to power multilingual experiences, it added.
In April this year, Reliance Industries announced that its subsidiary Reliance Jio had acquired 87% stake in Haptik for about ₹700 crore. Reliance holds about 87% of the business, while the rest is held by Haptik founders and employees through stock option grants.
Swapan Rajdev, co-founder and CTO of Haptik, said, in the statement, “Over the last 18 months, we have been primarily focused on customer service AI solutions. But given our mission to enable the paradigm shift from clicks to conversations, commerce was always the next frontier.”
Buzzo.ai enables an AI assistant that can understand a customer’s need through natural conversation, offers relevant recommendations and explains why that may be the best choice, the statement added. The AI assistant builds in-depth knowledge with available information such as product details and customer reviews.
“We have been working in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP), text processing, semantic search and information retrieval for more than 10 years,” added Buzzo.ai co-founder Anand Ramachandran, in the statement.
Source: Mint