Personal chat assistant app Haptik has appointed Silicon Valley veteran, Ram Gupta to its board of directors. With over 25 years of technology and operational experience, Ram will closely work with the Haptik management team on strategy and execution of the business. Haptik’s co-founder and CEO, Aakrit Vaish, co-founder and CTO, Swapan Rajdev and Rajesh Raju, Managing Director of Kalaari Capital are the other members of the Board.
Launched in March 2014 on Android and iOS, Haptik has been growing at a steady clip of 40 per cent month-on-month in 2015 and crossed the 10 million message milestone on its platform in May. The start-up has raised $1.1 million last September from Kalaari, has a core team of 31 and 260 chat operators.
“We were introduced to Ram by Kalaari a few months ago, and since then, he has already had a tremendous impact on the company. We have witnessed 10x growth in the last six months. Ram usually engages with more mature companies; we are fortunate that he has chosen to work with us,” Aakrit Vaish told
Haptik also has Sean Byrnes, Co-Founder and CTO of Flurry and Professor Dan Roth, an expert in the field of Machine Learning & Natural Language Processing, as Advisors.
“Companies like Haptik come around once in a lifetime. The product is on its path to have as big an impact on consumer behaviour as any other in the history of the Internet. Combine that with the stellar team, and I couldn’t wait to get started with Haptik,” said Ram Gupta, who was awarded the Smithsonian Computerworld ‘Search for the Heroes’ Award for 2000.
Before he became an investor/advisor, Ram served as the President and CEO of Cast Iron Systems, which became the largest vendor of application integration appliances, with 500 per cent growth in revenue and customer base, and was then acquired by IBM. Prior to that, as Executive Vice-President at PeopleSoft, he was instrumental in taking the company from primarily an HR applications vendor in the US to the second largest vendor of application suites worldwide.
He led over 6,000 people in 15 different countries, managed a P&L of $1.6 billion and under his guidance the market capitalisation grew from $3 billion to over $10 billion, and the company was then acquired by Oracle.