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Skit, formerly known as Vernacular.ai, raised $23 million as part of its Series B funding led by WestBridge Capital. Other investors including Kalaari Capital, Exfinity Ventures, Angelist syndicate led by Aaryaman Vir Shah from Prophetic Ventures, and Letsventure syndicate led by Sense AI will also participate in this round.
Founded in 2016 by Sourabh Gupta and Akshay Deshraj, Skit is an AI-first SaaS voice automation company. Its suite of speech and language solutions enable enterprises to automate call centre operations. With over 10 million hours of training data, its product – Vernacular Intelligent Voice Assistant (VIVA) – can respond in over 16 languages, covering over 160 dialects and replicating human-like conversations.
Fresh capital
The fresh capital will be used for sales and marketing, building delivery capabilities, R&D to speed up innovation, and enhancing the company’s products. The fundraising follows a Series A announcement in May 2020, led by Exfinity Ventures and Kalaari Capital, AngelList, with IAN Fund and LetsVenture also participating in the round.
This Series B funding brings the start-up’s total raise to $30 million. The company plans to double down and scale operations in both Indian and global markets.
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Since the last fundraise, Skit claims to have increased its revenue and customer growth by over 4x building a strong partner network across industries such as banking, insurance, e-commerce, consumer durables and travel & logistics among others. The company has strengthened its workforce by over 6x to prepare for future growth.
Large market
Commenting on the fundraise, Sourabh Gupta, CEO and Co-founder of Skit, said, “This investment comes when we are making strategic inroads into the US and south-east Asian markets. The global contact centre market size is expected to grow steadily and reach a value of $496 billion dollars by 2027. To address this sizeable growth, we at Skit are using voice bot innovation and our market observations to personalise caller experiences at customer contact centres, deliver up to 50 per cent cost reduction, and provide a superior customer experience.”
With the fresh funding, Skit will potentially address the over $300 billion voice customer service market globally with its AI-based voice automation platform – Vernacular Intelligent Voice Assistant (VIVA). VIVA helps enterprises improve engagement strategies by utilising speech recognition and natural language understanding (NLU) technology. VIVA has been deployed to help enterprises boost customer stickiness and loyalty.
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