Recently, the conversational voice AI startup Agara announced that the company raised $4.3 million Pre-Series A extension round led by UTEC, a Japan-based deep-tech venture capital firm. This brings the total funds raised by Agara to $7.5 million and includes bluechip investors Kleiner Perkins. 

According to sources, the funding will be used to accelerate product development and make a number of strategic hires in Agara’s technology department as well as growing the sales & marketing team in North America. 

Founded by Abhimanyu and Arjun Maheswaran in 2017, Agara develops industry-leading virtual voice agents that leverage proprietary machine learning models to understand intentions in speech, make intelligent decisions to handle queries and talk individual customers through to a resolution. The AI-based system patents have been developed by Agara’s team to help its voice agents understand, classify and summarize language. 

Abhimanyu said, “Whether it is sales calls, phone support or product feedback, voice has been the top choice for companies around the globe. We strive to be the pioneer in a voice-first world. With the new Covid norms, we expect the demand for virtual voice agents rises manifold. Last year, we processed over a million calls and a million emails in 12 countries across every continent in 4 languages.  With the new surge in demand, we are confident of increasing this number to over 5 million calls.”

Headquartered at New York, Agara plans to double its team of ML research executives and data scientists in 2021. The company also plans to establish its first pure AI research team at Bangalore in 2021. 

Kiran Mysore, Principal at UTEC added, “As a deep-tech fund, UTEC was impressed with Agara’s autonomous Voice AI agent powered by voice-first Applied ML algorithms and real-world data. Agara’s product-led growth puts them in the pole position to be a category-defining enterprise Voice AI company. We aim to supplement Agara through client and Go-to-market partnerships with Japanese MNCs.”