Reliance Industries Ltd, through its subsidiary Reliance Jio Digital Services Ltd (RJDSL), has acquired 87% stake in artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot company Haptik Infotech Pvt. Ltd for ₹700 crore, the oil-to-data firm said Wednesday.
“On a fully-diluted basis, Reliance will hold about 87% of the business with the rest being held by Haptik founders and employees through stock option grants,” RIL said in a press statement.
The investment will help Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd leverage Haptik’s capabilities to build India’s largest AI assistant across chat, voice and vernacular languages, RIL said.
The Haptik team will continue to drive growth of the business, including the enterprise platform as well as digital consumer assistants, RIL said.
“This strategic investment underlines our commitment to further boost the digital ecosystem and provide Indian users conversational AI enabled devices with multi-lingual capabilities,” said Reliance Jio director Akash Ambani. “We believe voice interactivity will be the primary mode of interaction for Digital India.”
“We look forward to using this strategic opportunity to exponentially scale up the business across various product lines,” said Haptik co-founder and CEO, Aakrit Vaish.
Source: Mint