Active.ai, a Singapore based fintech startup recently announced raising a fund of $3 million from leading venture capital funds IDG Ventures India and Kalaari Capital. Active.ai uses artificial intelligence to deliver virtual assistant banking services to its customers. It’s intelligent and omni-channel platform enables financial service companies such as banks, wealth managers and asset managers to engage with their customers over on bots, SMS or voice API’s.
This investment comes as a support to enable rapid growth of Active.ai to continuously advance its cutting-edge platform and to build out advanced AI features, enabling an increasing roster of clients to deliver a superior and engaging banking experience.
Just imagine you are travelling and have lost your credit card, and you urgently need to reach your bank. What would you do? Would you call the bank’s call center and wait in an endless IVR? What if you are able to use your favorite messaging channel and send an “I lost my card” message to your bank? And your bank can converse with you intelligently using an automated virtual assistant, block your card and issue you a new one! That is what Active.ai’s offers. Its solution will allow financial services companies to offer compelling UX that will simplify engagement via messaging platforms customers’ access in their daily lives.
Speaking on the investment, Ravishankar, CEO and Co-Founder said, “Conversation is the new UX and with banks opening up APIs, a new era of digital business is emerging. We are moving from ‘Mobile First’ to ‘AI first’ and Active.ai is the platform facilitating banks to achieve that.”
“Active.ai is helping banks redefine their digital strategy for the future, bringing in automation and intelligent customer engagement to banking and payments. The company’s intelligent and built for banking technology uses advanced NLP and machine intelligence to enable customers have natural dialogues over messaging, voice or IOT devices,” added Shankar Narayanan, COO and Co-Founder.
Ravishankar, Shankar Narayanan and Parikshit Paspulati (CTO and Co-Founder), bring a wealth of expertise in banking and fintech, having founded companies in mobile banking, payments and working in startup teams of leading banks in Asia. In a short period of time the company has gained significant traction with banks across Asia, added revenue and built a team of experts in banking technology and AI.
“43% of worldwide mobile phone consumers with a bank account use mobile banking today. The new generation of banking customers are looking for easy, secure and seamless interaction with their financial services provider. IDG Ventures India believes that AI will completely transform the banking industry, and we are very excited to partner with Active.ai to build the world’s largest conversational banking platform,” said Sanat Rao, IDG Ventures.
Bala Srinivasa, Kalaari Capital notes “messaging based mobile banking has become a strategic imperative for banks globally to enhance consumer experience and lower customer engagement costs. Active.ai is poised to tap into this large market opportunity with its chat and AI powered mobile customer engagement solution. Kalaari is excited to back this founding team given their past track record, banking domain knowledge, and deep technology expertise.“
