Indian speech recognition-as-a-service startup raises funding from IDG

Ravi Saraogi (left) and Umesh Sachdev are Uniphore’s co-founders.

A month after raising a series A round of funding led by Infosys founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, Uniphore, a Chennai-based speech recognition startup, today announced it has secured new investment from early stage venture capital fund IDG Ventures. The company has previously received funding from early stage VC fund IDG Ventures India, Indian Angel Network, and YourNest Angel Fund, among others.

The deal size remains undisclosed.

Uniphore provides voice biometrics, a virtual assistant, and speech analytics solutions to enterprises. These allow any software application to understand and respond to natural human speech. It is serving customers from industries like banking, insurance, outsourcing (BPOs), agriculture, and healthcare.

Unlike Apple’s Siri, Uniphore’s speech recognition savvy isn’t being crammed into a mobile assistant app. Instead it’s designed to be deployed in areas like mobile-based social marketing, voice banking backed up by voice biometric authentication, and enterprise management. One example is Uniphore’s mForce, which allows on-the-road workers – especially sales agents – to input new data (such as a sales lead) by talking into an app rather than fiddling with entering data into text boxes on their mobile screen.

The startup claims to have worked with over 70 enterprise customers and served over 4 million end users. It has offices in India, the Philippines, and the UAE. The fresh funding will be used for scaling its core technology development efforts and expand its presence in multiple markets across the globe.

This is the latest in a series of moves among speech tech startups in India. Previously, cloud communication startup Ozonetel acquired the speech recognition department of enterprise IT firm YantraSoft and another startup, AksharSpeech, to convert text to speech in Indian languages.