India’s Uniphore raises funding from Infosys founder to ease man-machine communication

Infosys founder Kris Gopalakrishnan

Uniphore, a Chennai-based speech recognition startup, today announced that it nabbed a series A round of funding led by Infosys founder Kris Gopalakrishnan. The company had earlier raised funding from early stage VC fund IDG Ventures India, Indian Angel Network, YourNest Angel Fund, among others.

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.

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 global expansion and product and technology development plans.

Siri, where’s my money?

“Gopalakrishnan’s experience in building mammoth and global businesses will help us move in the right direction. Additionally, these funds will help us attract talent in the industry which is very high-tech and niche. We are turning sci-fi into reality,” says Umesh Sachdev, co-founder and CEO of Uniphore Software Systems.

The idea of solving the complex problem of man-machine communication has attracted him to invest in the company, Gopalakrishnan says. After he stepped down from the Infosys board last year, he has made investments in Freshworld, a Bengaluru-based farm-to-fork fruit and vegetable delivery startup, and JetSynthesys, a digital and technology business firm.

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