- Samsung Venture has invested $8.5 million across four startups in India, including Gnani.ai.
- Gnani’s ASR engine has the potential to power the Korean company’s Bixby vernacular service in the future
Bangalore-based AI company Gnani.ai has raised Series A funding from Samsung Ventures Investment Corporation, the venture capital arm of Samsung Group. This makes Gnani.ai one of the first four Indian startups to have received funding from Samsung Ventures.
The company didn’t disclose the investment amount, but in a press release it announced that the funding will be used for product development, customer engagements and to accelerate its growth.
Gnani.ai is focused on automatic speech recognition and natural language processing for multiple applications such as multilingual voice assistants and speech analytics. It has also recently launched an AI conversational assistant, a voicebot over telephonic channels.
“This investment is a reaffirmation of our expertise in speech recognition technologies for multiple languages. We stay committed to our goal to continue being the leading speech recognition engine in Indic languages for voice assistant, call automation and speech analytics applications for multiple customers,” said Ganesh Gopalan, Co-founder and CEO, Gnani.ai.
Samsung Venture makes debut in India
Marking its debut in the country, Samsung Venture has invested $8.5 million across four startups in India, including Gnani.ai. The other three startups are system apps company OSLabs (Indus OS), IoT solutions provider Silvan Innovation Labs and an early-stage computer vision startup, whose name it did not disclose.
Samsung Venture invests in early-to-late stage startups that have a strategic fit with the South Korean company’s products and goals.
Gnani’s ASR engine has the potential to power the Korean company’s Bixby vernacular service in the future.
“Gnani.ai’s ASR engines have a significantly higher accuracy compared to even some of the global providers because we understand the nuances of the languages and dialects of a diverse country. That helps us tune our AI algorithms to perform better for this market,” said Ananth Nagaraj, Co-founder and CTO, Gnani.ai.
Gnani is already working with some of the biggest companies in the banking, insurance, e-commerce and financial services space. It has plans to expand globally to cover businesses in South East Asia, Middle East and the United States.
