Haptik - India's Biggest AI-based Personal Assistance Platform

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Haptik.

There are more than 3 billion people in the world who use messaging or digital voice interfaces on a daily basis. However, less than 1% use these mediums to communicate with businesses and brands. It is only a matter of time for this to change – enterprises will implement the infrastructure to enable these channels.

Haptik is born out of the belief that conversational AI will have the same paradigm shift, and the company is a global team of 200+ believers waiting to make it happen.

Haptik - Company Highlights

Haptik - About and How it Works?
Haptik - Logo and its Meaning
Haptik - Founder and History
Haptik - Mission
Haptik - Recent News
Haptik - Team
Haptik - Partnerships
Haptik - Business Model
Haptik - Revenue and Growth
Haptik - Funding and Investors
Haptik - Acquisitions
Haptik - Awards and Recognitions
Haptik - Competitors
Haptik - Challenges Faced
Haptik - Future Plans
Haptik - FAQs

Haptik - About and How it Works?

Haptik is an artificial intelligence company powering conversational assistants for brands to transform customer experiences. The company develops technology to enable enterprises to build conversational AI systems that allow users to converse with applications and electronic devices in free-format, natural language, using speech or text.

Haptik also has an automated conversational testing platform that enables real-time improvements to the AI. Haptik AI is a developer of conversational AI platforms intended to automate critical business processes.

The company's platform has a live agent tool for a bot to human handover and analytics dashboard to check chat level metrics and insights into what a customer really needs from business, enabling users to chat with experts for any query related to any company, product or service via text messages.

Haptik - Logo and its Meaning

The Haptik logo has hand that is very colorful, and the multiple colors serve a purpose – to symbolize how the app could help users with a wide range of tasks. Taken together, the hand and the colors were meant to say “I’m here to help, and I can help with a lot of things”.

The bright colors, in addition to being pleasing to the eye, were also meant to symbolize positivity and optimism – reflecting our confidence in the ability of the Haptik app to accomplish the many tasks that it would be asked to perform.

Haptik - Founder and History

Haptik was founded by Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev, both University of Illinois engineering alumni in August 2013.

Vaish recalls, “Swapan and I were working in San Francisco when the mobile app industry was taking off. One of the categories of apps that we saw take off significantly was messaging. We noticed people using messaging apps more than any other type of app, and the addiction to the interface was crazy. We figured there is something here to build on, and potentially a platform to support conversations everywhere beyond simply peer to peer chat. That’s when Haptik was born”.

In March 2014, the company launched its first product, the Haptik app which is a chat-based personal assistant for Android and iOS platforms in India.

Over time this evolved into full-blown conversational commerce app with over 2 million downloads with 15 million app installs. The company launched Life Insurance chat-bot for HDFC Life and a Baap Bot for Father's Day.

Haptik - Mission

Haptik's mission statement says, "To build artificial intelligence products that enable the paradigm shift of interaction from clicks to conversations."

Haptik - Recent News

Reliance Jio said that it has bought a majority stake in Haptik,  a startup that develops ‘conversational’ platforms and virtual assistants, in a deal worth $100 million overall. The transaction will see Jio will take an 87 percent stake in the company, with the remaining shares left for Haptik’s  founding team and staff. The deal includes 230 crore ($33 million) to buy out existing backers and an investment of 470 crore ($67 million).

Haptik announced that it has acqui-hired Convrg, a Los Angeles-based startup that develops chatbots, to serve customers in North America. According to Aakrit Vaish this move is part of Haptik’s broader strategy to both expand its technology expertise and team and business overseas.

Haptik - Team

• Aakrit Vaish - Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
• Swapan Rajdev - Co-Founder & CTO
• Kartik Poddar - Chief Business Officer
• Prateek Gupte - Director, Product & Engineering
• Krupal Modi - Head, Machine Learning
• Aman Srivastava - Machine Learning Scientist
• Audrey Wu - VP Strategic Partnerships

Transforming the AI employment landscape - AlmaBetter Data Science LER Program

India has always been home to innovation and creativity, fostering humandevelopment over many centuries. Sadly these virtues have not fully manifestedthemselves in shaping the current higher education system despite having worldclass institutions such as IITs, IIMs, etc. Students normally gradua…

StartupTalkyParnas Ghosh

Haptik - Partnerships

Haptik built the world’s largest WhatsApp chatbot for COVID-19. This was the official helpline for the Government of India which was utilized by over 21 million users across the country. The MyGov Corona Helpdesk was engineered to fight rumors, educate the masses and bring a sense of calm to the pandemic situation. Haptik built the Helpdesk ground-up using official data shared by the Government.

Kotak Life partnered with Haptik to develop an AI-driven conversational assistant called KAYA which provides 24X7 assistance to consumers.

The company partnered with Amazon Pay, HDFC Life, Ola Cabs, Uber, Times Internet, Mumbai City FC, Coca-Cola, Ziman, Zomato, BookMyShow, ClearTrip, Goibibo, UrbanClap, Via.com, Dineout, Flipkart, and Kotak Life to run campaigns on Haptik app.

In March 2018, the company partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide Al-enabled conversational solutions to customers in India.

Haptik has entered into a strategic partnership with Y Combinator-backed Leena AI to provide enterprises for all types of bot solutions.

Haptik's repertoire of chatbot customers in India includes Samsung, Future Group, KFC, Dream11, Sharekhan, Edelweiss, Tokio, Club Mahindra and IIFL among others. Haptik has also built assistants for TOI, Samsung, Ziman and Akancha Against Harassment, an online Cyber Safety Initiative.

Haptik is one of the world's largest conversational AI platforms. In October 2017, The Times of India app incorporated Haptik's virtual personal assistant service with Sprite as the exclusive brand partner. Samsung was the second partner who uses Haptik to power its ‘My Assistant’ service that is pre-installed on the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge in India.

Haptik built a scalable Support Bot for Dream11 which helped the online handle 8x their volume without a large support staff during IPL 2018.

Haptik - Business Model

Haptik has always been in the leading position when it came to the chatbot business. They were one of the very first enterprises to come up with the idea and have a huge advantage of the experience factor when compared to its competitors. They have had lots and lots of experimentations done on the concept and have almost perfected the art.

One of their biggest strong points is indeed the upper hand in technology. The in-depth knowledge in Machine Learning and NLP has also aided the company to be one step ahead of the competitors. They were one of the very first firms to reap the benefits of the chatbot industry by foreseeing the growing liking of the people to interface and personal assistance.

They also concentrated on being a B2B(business-to-business) model, which proved more effective for the team. The biggest advantage of Haptik is that they provide customized services to the customers. There is no one model for all kind of a concept that works there. This has also led to the team to stand out from the rest.

Haptik - Revenue and Growth

From a rather unsuccessful launch of its beta phase called Batman to becoming the nation’s biggest AI-based personal assistance platform, Haptik has indeed come a very long way. They have over one million downloads in Play Store and are the highest-rated mobile application in India.

The organization handles over 50 million conversation yearly and has a clean history when it comes to customer churns. This is no ordinary feat and the team has indeed worked very hard to reach where they are today.

More and more people seek the assistance of chatbots to solve their daily problems and help in easier decision making. The company is now looking forward to expanding there scope across the globe and are absolutely confident that they will be able to see the same magnitude of results they could see in India.

Mumbai-based conversational AI assistant Haptik has attained 105% of its revenue target in the first quarter of financial year 2020 despite the pandemic and the reduced cash flow from the travel tech sector which suffered huge losses due to the travel restrictions.

Haptik - Funding and Investors

Haptik has raised a total of $12.2M in funding over 2 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Apr 5, 2016 from a Series B round. Haptik is funded by 3 investors. Times Internet and Vivek Kumar are the most recent investors.

Haptik - Acquisitions

Haptik has acquired 2 organizations. Their most recent acquisition was Buzzo.ai on Sep 24, 2019.

Haptik - Awards and Recognitions

Haptik won ‘AI for Good Award’ for the year 2018 at the 4th Annual Canadian Fintech and  AI awards. Haptik’s client list includes Fortune 500 names such as Coca-Cola, Samsung, KFC, Tata Group and Mahindra Group, among others.

The company launched in the year 2013 was awarded for its 24×7 bot which benefits its users in fields of cyber safety and harassment. Haptik developed a bot named Akancha Against Harassment or AHH bot, authorized by Akancha Srivastava, a prominent cyber safety pundit and founder of the Akancha Against Harassment (AAH) vision. The bot enhances and educates people about cyber safety in a captivating and conversational procedure. The technology gives a comprehensive information on the absolute process and more users pursuing help and safety against cyber harassment.

Haptik - Competitors

The top  competitors in Haptik's competitive set are Floatbot, Vernacular, Yellow Messenger, SendBird, Niki, and Askarvi.

Haptik - Challenges Faced

Vaish says “Being at the forefront of an industry which is still evolving means that there is no predefined playbook which can be followed to assure results. At Haptik, on an everyday basis, we try out various different experiments some of which succeed while some of them don’t”.

The company faces challenges on all aspects of engineering starting from scaling, research in machine learning, product and design. They perform research in-house and work closely with academia and other institutes to be able to find the best solutions to advance the chatbot and machine learning space.

Having said that, it cannot be denied that chatbot space is growing by leaps and bounds, with traditional slow moving businesses automating their procedures and using chatbot to become more efficient. The founders of Haptik believe that with the growth of AI technology, bots will be able to understand regular human speech in both text and voice.

“Vernacular language support is another interesting field that is currently open to innovation. We can also expect to see chatbots on various other platforms apart from websites and messengers. Chatbots will become more prevalent and be a part of everyday life for everyone who owns a smartphone!”, Vaish added.

How AI Chatbot Increases Sales/ Sales Boost by AI Chatbot

Artificial intelligence chatbots mainly distinguish themselves from other chatbots by their ability to understand the intentions behind the customer’s questions. Chatbots provide the precise information customers are looking for.

StartupTalkyTanusha Verma

Haptik - Future Plans

Haptik's team is looking forward to expand further into newer and bigger markets. Haptik has a few clients in the US with IoT, chatbot, and voice assistance market growing extensively in India. A Hansa Cequity Customer Experience Trends Report suggests that the chatbot market will touch $2.3 billion by the end of 2020 from its current $700 million.

"We invested in Haptik back in 2016 based on the early signs of messaging as a paradigm for user interactions. Over the last year, we have seen tremendous adoption in enterprises adopting it as a platform to communicate with their users, with successful results. We are really bullish on what's to come from team Haptik in the next few months, and are prepared to back them all the way to making this a large global technology company from India." said Aakrit, founder of Haptik.

Haptik - FAQs

What does Haptik do?

Haptik is an artificial intelligence company powering conversational assistants for brands to transform customer experiences. Haptik develops technology to enable enterprises to build conversational AI systems that allow users to converse with applications and electronic devices in free-format, natural language, using speech or text.

Which company owns Haptik?

The Reliance Industries owns Haptik.

Who founded Haptik?

Haptik was founded by Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev, in August 2013.

When was Haptik founded?

Haptik was founded in August 2013.

Who is the current CEO of Haptik?

Aakrit Vaish is the current CEO of Haptik.