Lightspeed, Angel Investors Bet $4 Mn On Conversational AI Yellow Messenger

Bengaluru-based conversational AI solutions provider Yellow Messenger has raised $4 Mn (INR 27 Cr) in a Series A funding round from Lightspeed Venture Partners and prominent angel investors.

The angel investors who participated in the round include Phanindra Sama, founder, Redbus and CIO of Telangana; Kashyap Deorah, founder of Hypertrack; Anand Swaminathan, senior partner, McKinsey & Co.; Prashant Malik, cofounder, Limeroad; Nishant Rao, former MD, Linkedin India; Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, cofounders, Snapdeal; Monisha Varadan, Zephyr Ventures and Alap Bharadwaj, APAC Innovation, Google.

The fresh funds will be used towards research and development. They will also invest in developing cutting-edge deep tech capabilities, and expand its customer success teams and presence in high-potential markets across Asia, the Middle East, and other emerging markets.

Prior to this round, the company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in 2016. The startups has been incubated at startup accelerators Microsoft Accelerator and SAP Startup Studio. It was also a part of Amrita Technology Business Incubator’s PitchFest 2018.

Founded in 2016 by Raghu Ravinutala, Rashid Khan and Jaya Kishore Reddy, Yellow Messenger deploys artificial intelligence (AI) to help some of the world’s largest enterprises reach and engage with customers conversationally, and through myriad ways.

Yellow Messenger is looking to empower enterprises with its cutting edge platform capabilities, deep vertical and process knowledge formulated into pre-built ready-to-use bot templates. These templates are thoroughly customisable for each customer with minimal code, and deep consultative hands-on enterprise engagements.

The company leverages its natural language processing technology that seamlessly understands over 130 languages including English, Hindi, Bahasa, Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin, and Arabic. At present, it is operating across more than 10 industry verticals including retail, travel & hospitality, banking, insurance, pharma and healthcare, energy, and consumer goods.

Its clients include the likes of Unilever, AXA, AIG, Bajaj Finance, HDFC Bank, Asian Paints, Dr. Reddy labs, and Concentrix.

Yellow Messenger claims to have handled over a billion conversations and claims to have driven incremental revenue growth in tens of millions of dollars, reduction in support costs by 300%, and increased NPS (Net Promoter Score) by 45% for its clients. Further, Yellow Messenger claims to have recorded a revenue growth of ARR (Annual recurring revenue) of more than 5 times in just the past one year.

Dev Khare, partner at Lightspeed Ventures said, “We believe that Asia’s businesses require fundamentally different solutions for enterprise software, driven by unique organisational structures and consumer expectations, Yellow Messenger is tapping into the messaging-centric expectation that Asia’s 4.5 Bn consumers have for interacting with large consumer companies in verticals such as banking, financial services, utilities, travel, and ecommerce.”

Yellow Messenger competes with the players such as Haptik, which was recently acquired by Reliance Jio. Haptik cofounder and CEO Aakrit Vaish has written that the conversational AI world has come a long way from being just a novelty item for businesses to being a feature with actual, substantial quantitative and qualitative advantages.