Reliance Jio has picked up a majority stake in Haptik, the B2B chatbot solution for enterprises.
Telecom giant Reliance Jio has struck a deal worth Rs 700 crore (about $100 million) in enterprise Chatbot AI startup Haptik and has acquired 87 percent stake.
Of the total investment, Rs 230 crore will go for the initial business transfer. On a fully diluted basis, Reliance Industries will hold about 87 percent of the business with the rest being held by Haptik founders and employees through stock option grants, Haptik said in a release.
Speaking on the investment, Akash Ambani, Director, Reliance Jio, said, “This strategic investment underlines our commitment to further boost the digital ecosystem and provide Indian users conversational AI enabled devices with multi-lingual capabilities. We believe voice interactivity will be the primary mode of interaction for Digital India. We are delighted to announce this partnership, and look forward to working with the experienced team of Haptik.”
Haptik’s existing shareholder which is Times Internet will exit. Haptik’s business and holdings will be transferred to Reliance Jio Digital Services Ltd. but products at present will continue to be branded as Haptik. In the future, Haptik could use the Reliance brand name.
Speaking on the acquisition, Haptik Co-founder Aakrit Vaish says, “This investment by Reliance Jio offers us a unique opportunity to massively scale up our operations and make a significantly greater impact in the conversational AI space. It will provide us with the resources and the support to develop world-class conversational AI technology across both enterprise and consumer product lines.”
Haptik will get access to the RJIO platform and can reach a customer base of over 300 million and RJIO would look forward to touching 1 billion customers with new features.
The Haptik team will also continue to fuel the growth of the business through the enterprise platform as well as digital consumer assistants. Haptik’s co-founders and employees will hold minority interest in Reliance Jio Digital Services.
“Reliance is one of those very few large companies that have such a big vision. The pace, belief, and understanding they have in conversational AI are unparalleled, and even beats many large global giants. It, therefore, made great synergic sense to work with Reliance.” said Aakrit.
