Bengaluru, 26th November 2018: Verloop, the GrowthStory-promoted SaaS customer engagement automation provider, today announced the closing of a US $ 3 million Series A investment round led by IDFC Parampara Fund, which invests in technology IP and innovation-themed start-ups.

Co-investors in this round include Kris Gopalakrishnan – Infosys Co-founder and Dr Ranjan Pai – Chairman of the Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG).

Verloop is promoted by GrowthStory, the venture-builder platform founded by serial entrepreneurs K Ganesh and Meena Ganesh.

The funding will be utilized 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.

What do our leaders say:

“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 organizations 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,”

“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,”

said Jatin Desai, General Partner, IDFC-Parampara.

“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.

More than 120 million unique conversations have been processed since Verloop launched operations in late 2016. Verloop use-cases span Marketing & Sales (Lead Gen qualification, conversational campaigns, upsell and cross-sell etc), Customer Support (automated helpdesk, personalized onboarding of customers etc) and Celebrity Brand Management (persona management, engaging with fans, pre- and post- launch etc).

Clients who have leveraged the Verloop platform include Nykaa, Qtrove, Pipa Bella, Portea, Apollo Munich Health Insurance, and Aadhaar Bridge.

Falguni Nayar, Founder & CEO, Nykaa said:

“Since implementing Verloop, Nykaa has been able to clear more customer queries, resulting in greater post-purchase customer satisfaction. Verloop has also enabled us to respond to customers during live purchase and share product links, allowing us to deliver better assistance and beauty advice. This helps us to deliver an improved and personalized shopping experience to our customers.” 

Nykaa is India’s leading beauty retailer.

Way forward

The Verloop platform has also been used by some of the biggest stars in Indian entertainment including Rajinikanth for his movie Kaala. Several other mainstream and niche celebrities, publication houses and entertainment magazines are utilising conversational automation to connect with fans and readers.

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 of conversations when it detects that the conversation can be better served by a human chat rep.

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.