Haptik Mafia: Where Is the Ex-Haptik Team Now?

Haptik CEO and Co-Founder Aakrit Vaish recently said this in a LinkedIn post – “Today I’m so thrilled to see that we have our own little ‘Haptik Mafia’! There are close to 20 startups that have been started by ex-Haptikans.”

When he used the term ‘Haptik Mafia’ he was, of course, referring to his colleagues who worked with him at Haptik and have now gone on to begin their entrepreneurial journey by launching new startups.

Vaish mentions in this post – “When we started Haptik, I had a dream beyond just making the business successful. I used to often tell potential hires that at Haptik, we want you to ‘enter an employee, and leave an entrepreneur’.”

History of Haptik
Ex-Haptikans – Where are they
Growth Timeline of Haptik
Conclusion

History of Haptik

Founded by Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev in August 2013, Haptik was an Indian enterprise conversational AI platform. Its first product, the Haptik app was launched in March 2014. It was a personal assistant that was chat-based allowing its users to get things done. In India, the app was available on the Android and iOS platforms. Within the first six months, by September 2014, the platform added 125 chat experts who helped users with their queries.

Ex-Haptikans – Where are they

As an AI company that grew and keeps momentum under the Reliance umbrella, its team is motivated and focused. There are a few ex-Haptikans who moved on from the company to then follow their entrepreneurial dreams and have succeeded with gusto.

Akhil Aryan

He worked with Haptik in the Product and Growth section between 2015 and 2016. His obsession with the nature of electrons and energy encouraged him to launch ION Energy. His firm is engaged in building cutting-edge technologies that accelerate the earth’s new energy transition.

Ronak Agrawal

Working with Haptik in 2016 as a Growth Manager, Ronak Agrawal is now the Founder and CEO of SkilloVilla which is engaged in building scalable solutions for emerging markets in education and skill development.

Prateek Gupte

Prateek Gupte is the Co-Founder of Relove, a company engaged in waste-free subscription service for personal care products that reuse packaging. He moved on from Haptik after working with them for more than four years. His last position with Haptik was as a VP for Products.

Rahul Zutshi & Kartik Poddar

Kartik worked with Haptik for over 3 years and his last held position was Chief Business Officer. Rahul Zutshi was with Haptik for less than a year as a Marketing Director. The two ex-Haptikans launched Zohort a skill tech company building a software salesforce.

Achal Kothari

Moving on from Haptik after more than 4 years as the Head of Customer Success, Achal is now building Bytebeam to transform the way IOT apps are built.

Atif Khatri

He served as Head of Recruitment at Haptik between 2016 and 2017. Atif has now built TalentStack – Your Global Talent Partner which is a global recruiting business.

Jubin Varghese

Working as the Quality Control Lead at Haptik for three years, Jubin is now the Co-Founder and CEO of Gegadyne Energy to change the way EV batteries are produced.

Simranjot Singh & Pratham Agrawal

Pratham Agrawal has worked with Haptik for over two years as a Tech Lead, Frontend. Simranjot Singh moved on from Haptik for more than 3 years as an iOS Engineer. They collaborated and co-founded Canonic which is working towards enabling serverless backends.

Aaryamaan

Moving on from Haptik Aaryamaan decided to give back to the global ecosystem as an investor in Prophetic Ventures. He is also building an NFT startup named Ludo Labs.

Growth Timeline of Haptik

• August 2015 – Dan Roth joined Haptik’s Board of Advisors who helped to scale the platforms Natural Language Processing (NLP). It was also appointed the official personal assistant of Mumbai City FC and provided a customer support chatbox to Swipe Telecom in the same year
• November 2017 – The company launched a full-scale enterprise-level bot management platform which included an analytics dashboard
• Year 2019 – Haptik launched a voice bot for one of the largest food chains in the world. It allowed customers to place orders using Alexa. It provided accurate time information on product availability as well as helped users find the nearest outlet of that food chain
• March 2019 – Haptik entered into a partnership pact with the Government of Maharashtra to develop a chatbox for its Aaple Sarkar platform providing conversational access to information regarding the 1400 services that were managed by the state government
• April 2019 – Reliance Jio Infocom Ltd., bought an 87% stake in the company for USD 100 million. Haptik was renamed to Jio Haptik Technologies Ltd
• July 2019 – The new company Jio Haptik Technologies Ltd., acquired Convrg, a Los-Angeles based startup to expand its technical expertise and business outreach to North America
• November 2019 – Saumil Shah joined Jio Haptik as the Vice President of Engineering
• December 2019 – Jio Haptik developed the chatbox ‘Prof. Simply Simple’ for Tata Mutual Fund. The chatbox helped in resolving routine, repetitive queries leaving the Customer Support Team free to resolve complex queries
• March 2020 – Jio Haptik built a WhatsApp chatbox called MyGov Corona Helpdesk for the Government of India. The chatbox helped create awareness about the coronavirus
• December 2021 – Jio Haptik was awarded special honor by Meenakshi Lekhi – Minister of State for External Affairs for partnering with MyGov to create the Corona helpdesk
• Year 2022 – Jio Haptik announced to build a chatbox for a hotel management and ticket booking platform RedDoorz, located in Indonesia

Conclusion

As Jio Haptik Technologies Ltd., continues on its path of excellence it has ranked in the top 5 in AI and Analytics Products Category for G2 Best Software Awards 2022. Looking at the ex-Haptikans and their successful journeys here’s wishing them all the best for the future.

FAQs

Who is the CEO of Haptik?

Aakrit Vaish is th CEO and Co-founder of Haptik.

When did Reliance Jio buy Haptik?

Reliance Jio Infocom Ltd bought 87% stake in the company for USD 100 million in April 2019. Haptik was renamed to Jio Haptik Technologies Ltd.