Verloop raises $3 Million from IDFC Parampara, Kris Gopalakrishnan and Dr Ranjan Pai
Verloop, a GrowthStory-promoted SaaS customer engagement automation provider, has announced the closing of a US $ 3 million Series A investment round led by IDFC Parampara Fund. Co-investors in this round include Kris Gopalakrishnan — Infosys Co-founder and Dr Ranjan Pai — Chairman of the Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG).
“The funding will be utilised to enhance the Verloop customer engagement platform as the company expands its team and scales operations to address the global market for automated customer services and marketing that MetricNet estimates is valued at $ 19 billion annually,” read a communiqué from the company.
GrowthStory is a venture-builder platform founded by serial entrepreneurs K Ganesh and Meena Ganesh.
“Our conversational automation platform already works with more than 5000 clients across eCommerce, Healthcare, Education, Entertainment & Lifestyle sectors across 37 countries. This investment is a striking endorsement from some of the savviest and most well-known names in start-up and tech ecosystem and comes at a time when we are continuing to hire top talent and build further traction for the business,” said Gaurav Singh, the 28-year old Founder & CEO of Verloop.
“People are seeking out a conversational experience with brands and Verloop helps organisations do this at scale. Over the last several months we’ve undertaken an intricate assessment of the Verloop platform, its architecture and the product roadmap. We were very impressed at the way the team has built Verloop and are delighted to partner with Gaurav and his team. The use-cases they’ve built are very interesting and there is great potential for the product to verticalize and mine the potential for automated customer engagement across industries, across countries and across languages,” said Jatin Desai, General Partner, IDFC-Parampara.
“There have been a few notable success stories of Saas-based ventures from India and we believe Verloop certainly has the credentials to emerge a leader in the Conversational AI market that is currently led by players such as Drift and Intercom, globally,” he added.
“We are seeing a massive behavioural shift with people demanding personalized and conversational brand experiences. Large, growing organizations and celebrity brands will be hard pressed to meet this requirement profitably and at-scale as interactions run into multiple millions. This is where ML (machine learning) technology coupled with human ingenuity comes in and can help harvest the potential in these interactions. Verloop has built an easily scalable model to target a huge addressable market,” said Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-Founder, Infosys.
Verloop.io is a language-agnostic platform that already supports 7 Indian languages including Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali and Hinglish. In addition, the company has developed a new messaging protocol and a patent-pending technology for bot to human handoff conversations when it detects that the conversation can be better served by a human chat rep.
The Verloop platform has been deployed by Nykaa, Qtrove, Pipa Bella, Portea, Apollo Munich Health Insurance and Aadhaar Bridge.
Verloop use-cases span Marketing & Sales (Lead Gen qualification, conversational campaigns, up-sell and cross-sell etc), Customer Support (automated helpdesk, personalised onboarding of customers etc) and Celebrity Brand Management (persona management, engaging with fans, pre- and post- launch etc).
Verloop was part of the YC (Y Combinator) Startup School 2017 and has made numerous machine learning contributions to MIT Machine Learning libraries, Facebook ML libraries and other open source ML libraries. The Verloop team also delivered a presentation on mixed language(Hinglish) detection and understanding at a Bertelsmann conference in Hamburg.
