Reliance Jio-Owned Haptik Acquires Ecommerce Chatbot Buzzo.ai

Reliance Jio-owned conversational AI assistant Haptik has acquired an AI recommendation chatbot Buzzo.ai for around $3 Mn – $4 Mn.

Mumbai-based Buzzo.ai was founded by Vivek Arya and Anand Ramachandran in 2016 and offers personalised recommendations to users, based on insights extracted using artificial intelligence algorithms on user reviews across the web.

Haptik cofounder Swapan Rajdev said the acquisition would allow Haptik to enhance its voice and chat offerings for ecommerce, and also strengthen its multilingual customer service experience.“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,” Rajdev said in a press statement

Buzzo’s recommendation engine works across shopping, travel, entertainment and food verticals. “In 2016 we were looking for a new problem to solve in the same area and found that conversational commerce was still a wide open space. We were confident that our approach would lead to genuine end-user impact, and combining that with the world moving to being voice first, we knew we were on to something.” Arya said.

“As creators of technology, the only way to see the fruit of our work is with massive scale. And that’s what got us excited about Haptik, particularly after their alliance with Reliance Jio.” he added.

Founded in 2013 by Aakrit Vaish and Rajdev, Haptik lets customers chat with voice assistants to complete daily tasks such as online shopping, travel bookings, food delivery among others. The company claims to have reached over 100 Mn devices and processed more than 2 Bn conversations till date. Some of its notable clients and enterprise partners include Samsung, OYO, KFC, Coca-Cola, Tata Group, and Club Mahindra among others.  

In April 2019, Reliance Jio had announced acquiring 87% stake in Haptik for about $100 Mn. At that time,  the company said that this partnership will give a boost to Haptik’ s existing enterprise grade business, as it continues to build innovative AI solutions for corporates globally.

Later in July, Haptik had acquired a Los Angeles-based conversational AI startup Convrg, to strengthen its operations in North America. “We’ve been doing business in North America for a few years now, but given the nature of the market, we knew we needed a dedicated full-time operation there,” Vaish had earlier said in a media statement.

According to filings accessed by Inc42, in FY18 Haptik reported a total revenue of INR 4.58 Cr (189% increase from FY17) and expense of INR 27.85 Cr (10% drop from FY17). Its net losses for FY18 stand at INR 22.54 Cr.

The global conversational AI market is expected to reach $15.7 Bn by 2024, as compared to $4.2 Bn in 2019. Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of the sector is predicted to be 30.2% between 2019 to 2024.