On a fully diluted basis, RIL will hold about 87 per cent stake in the company, with the rest with Haptik’s founders and employees.
Haptik has entered a strategic partnership with Reliance Industries, through its subsidiary Reliance Jio Digital Services Ltd. The total transaction size, including primary capital investment, is about 700 crores (100 million USD), with 230 crores as the consideration for the initial business transfer from Haptik to Jio.
The Haptik team aims to drive the growth of the business, including the enterprise platform as well as digital consumer assistants. On a fully diluted basis, RIL will hold about 87 per cent stake in the company, with the rest with Haptik’s founders and employees.
Conversational UI – The game changer
In 2013, Haptik was born out of a belief that conversational UI is the most native experience for the 21st-century smartphone user, and that it can be leveraged for more than just personal communication.
For over half a decade, Haptik has been at the forefront of the conversational AI revolution in India – first as a mobile virtual assistant app, and then as a solutions provider for large enterprises. Haptik’s platform has cumulatively processed over 2 billion conversations to date.
Aakrit Vaish, co-founder and CEO of Haptik, said, “We started with the idea that conversational interfaces will cause a paradigm shift in the way people get things done. Over the course, we have built various products across both consumer and enterprise businesses, with the backbone always being a full stack chat and voice-enabled AI technology platform. We truly believe now is the opportunity to serve the next billion users who come online, and who better to partner with than one of the world’s largest digital ecosystems in Jio. We look forward to using the capital and strategic opportunity to exponentially scale up the business across various product lines.”
Akash Ambani, director, Reliance Jio, said “This strategic investment underlines our commitment to further boost the digital ecosystem and provide Indian users conversational AI enabled devices with multilingual capabilities. We believe voice interactivity will be the primary mode of interaction for digital India. We are delighted to announce this partnership, and look forward to the highly experienced team of Haptik in realizing this vision for greater connectivity and rich communication experiences to the billion-plus Indian consumers.”