Niki Raises $2M Series A Funding To Develop The AI Powered Chatbot For E-Commerce

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Niki is an Artificial Intelligence powered chatbot that helps you shop for products and services and makes the whole journey from discovery to transaction smart, fast, convenient and extremely simple. The services cover a wide spectrum ranging from utility services like recharge and bill payments, travel services like cabs, hotels, food ordering, and entertainment. To find out more about their chatbot we sat down with Sachin Jaiswal, CEO at Niki.ai:

Q: You’ve recently announced $2 Million Series A Founding Round; could you tell us something more?

A: We received $2 M in Series A round of funding from San Francisco based fund SAP.iO (first investment in India) and existing investor Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures. The funding also saw participation from other Indian investors including Haresh Chawla (Partner at True North) and Arihant Patni, along with some US and German investors. Prior to this round, we had also received seed funding from Ratan Tata.

Niki.ai has been focused on building the product for the past 2 years. We believe we have the capability to disrupt the AI and bot space. Owing to our robust technology, innovative solutions and successful business model, we have managed to win significant investor confidence globally, with our existing investors continuing to back us strongly.

We plan on investing the newly raised capital in further strengthening our machine learning capabilities, building voice and multilingual functionalities and expanding our distribution network. Also, we’ll continue working towards providing consumers with multiple touch points to access Niki. With our SDK being deployed across platforms (Android, iOS, Web, Messaging apps) by banks, OEMs, wallets & startups; we move a step closer to our vision of being ubiquitous. The current fund raise will be utilised to further strengthen our distribution.

Q: What is the story behind Niki, how did you start?

A: Over 2 billion people in the world use messaging apps today. The number is set to grow exponentially with growing internet and smartphone penetration. Also, research shows that messaging apps are the most used ones among all the other apps. If one could take care of all the important payments and bookings right from an interface he or she is used to, the experience can be unbeatable. We did extensive research around it and came up with the idea.

Started in May 2015, Niki.ai envisions to provide one shop for everything commerce. Niki is an AI bot who converses to help you shop for products and services and makes the whole journey from discovery to transaction fast, convenient and extremely simple. Niki currently provides a wide array of services to over 400,000 consumers. The services covers a wide spectrum ranging from utility services like recharge and bill payments, travel services like cabs, buses and hotels, food ordering, entertainment services like movies and events, home services like laundry to name a few.

To the businesses, Niki.ai provides a plug and play technology in the form of Niki Chatbot Software Development Kit, that can be easily integrated on their platform to sell smart with an AI. The SDK empowers the brand to provide an integrated services marketplace for their users through conversational commerce on their mobile and web apps. The Niki Software Development Kit (SDK) is mere 1mb in size, and can be integrated with a development effort of 30 minutes and 10 lines of code. For brands, it’s much simple since we will replicate the entire transactional experience and provide them in form of a SDK.

Q: Why is now the time for a technology solution like Niki?

A: According to many industry experts, bots will replace apps in the next 5 years. This means that all your work that is currently performed on multiple apps will be done on a single chat interface. The world is at the cusp of the next revolution, powered by Artificial Intelligence, and we want to ride high on this AI wave.

A research predicts that India alone will have around 450 million smartphone and internet users by 2020. This number has grown rapidly around the world. Also, according to a survey, 3 out of every 4 smartphone users use one or the other messaging app. Messaging on different platforms is something we have become habitual to, it now feels natural. And what’s better than shopping for products and services through natural conversation on the same platform where one spends significant amount of his or her daily time.

Through Niki, we want to make AI accessible to everyone. The aim is to take e-commerce to people in deeper geographies that have connectivity issues and people are loathed to download many apps due to bandwidth constraints and limited usage of the smartphone.

Q: How exactly does Niki work, what can you do with it?

A: Imagine a friend that is there 24×7 available on chat to advise you on which hotel to book, which bus to take, which movie to see and then even completes the booking for you! That is Niki. Chat, explore and get work done with ease. Niki is smart to understand your needs and recommend you personalised options across services.

Q: What are your plans?

A: We plan to integrate many more services on our platform so that for most of the needs that a user may have, Niki is the first thing that strikes his mind. A few months down the line, we hope Niki becomes your stockbroker, insurance agent, travel planner, to name a few.

We are working towards mitigating the hassles of the customers by providing them a simple to use and friendly conversational interface. To facilitate improve the experience for a mobile user, we are soon going to add the feature of voice communication in Niki.

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