Indian telecom services provider, Bharti Airtel, has announced an acquihire deal with AuthMe ID Services, a Bangalore based start-up focused on Artificial Intelligence based solutions.
As part of the deal, the core team of AuthMe will join Airtel and be a part of Airtel X Labs in Bangalore.
“We are rapidly scaling up Airtel X Labs, our digital innovation factory, and these new solutions will accelerate our journey towards rolling out intuitive digital products, particularly in vernacular languages, for our 430 mn plus customers,” said Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO, Bharti Airtel.
Airtel has set up Airtel X Labs with the aim of driving cutting edge innovation in the areas of AI, IoT, AR and VR and is building a world-class team for the facility.
With 2 to 5 trillion records per day, over 10 billion calls per month and 10s of petabytes of data per month, Airtel is actively hiring data scientists in Bangalore. All this data could be used for network optimisation, smartphone characterisation, recommendation engines, chatbot customer support, customer profiling across multiple lines of businesses. Santanu Bhattacharya is the company’s Chief Data Scientist.
Airtel X Labs has already leased around 50 seats at Cowrks, in Bangalore. According to sources the company soon plans to increase this to 200 seats.
With the acquisition, Airtel now owns the intellectual property rights for two flagship solutions developed by AuthMe:
- Callup AI — Callup AI has created a chat and voice assistant that uses the power of AI to quickly and effectively resolve customer queries over email, chat and phone calls. Callup AI features include voice integration, unsupervised learning and the application is built for vernacular languages with zero integration time. The solution is used by 10 companies across three countries in banking, finance, payments and housing domains. For more details — https://www.callup.ai/
- Fintech OCR — An end to end Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline built for financial documents. The application is designed for processing KYC docs, bank/credit card/loan statements, mark sheets, and can be customised to process known formats of other documents. It can pick up any language with standard fonts.
