AI-Based Voice Assistant Startup MiHup Raises $1.7 Mn In Series A Round

Artificial intelligence-based personal mobile assistant app MiHup has raised INR 12.5 Cr ($1.7 Mn) in its Series A funding from Accel Partners and Ideaspring Capital.

MiHup was founded in 2016 by Biplab Chakraborty, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Sandipan Mandal, and Tapan Barman. Powered by intelligent voice interfaces, it claims to offer human-like understanding of naturally spoken queries for large, complex content domains.

The AI-enabled speech recognition platform for vernacular languages also supports mixed language and dialects. The service is currently available in Hindi, Bengali and English.

According to the startup, the platform is suitable for use-cases such as car control, media and entertainment and customer call analysis.

“This will help us to further our ambition of adding more Indian languages into our engine. We support English, Hindi and Bengali fully and very limited use cases for additional 12 Indian languages. Our immediate aim is to fully support the next 8 most spoken Indian languages”, said Biplab Chakraborty, cofounder and COO of MiHup.

Prior to this, in 2016, the startup had secured INR 45 Cr from Accel Partners in a seed funding round. Accel Partners took a 20% stake in the company as part of the round.

AI Takes Centrestage For Startups And Investors

More and more startups are now looking to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to offer various products. Meanwhile, investors and traditional companies are also looking to partner with these companies to stay ahead in the game.

According to Hansa Cequity’s ‘Customer Experience Trends Report 2019,’ the chatbot market size is expected to grow to reach 2.3 Bn by 2020. Apart from MiHup, some other notable players in this segment are Niki.ai and Haptik.

Earlier this month, Reliance Industries via its subsidiary Reliance Jio Digital Services Limited had acquired 87% stake in chatbot startup Haptik for INR 230 Cr.

In India, a study by Accenture revealed that artificial intelligence (AI) could add $957 Bn to the economy with the potential to increase the country’s income by 15% by 2035.

Recently in an interview with CNBC, SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son said that AI will be the biggest revolution in human history.  He believes AI can revolutionise in next 20-30 years — “Autonomous driving, autonomous flying, distribution of the goods and food, diseases like cancer will get AI solutions”.

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