Haresh Chawla and Ronnie Screwvala invest in startup Niki.ai

Posted on December 7, 2016

The Bengaluru – based AI startup, Niki.ai, has raised funds of Rs. 3 crores from existing investors like Haresh Chawla, who is a partner of India Value Fund Advisors (IVFA) and Ronnie Screwvala who is the founder of Unilazer Ventures. This is the third time that Unilazer has invested in Niki.ai which is owned and operated by Techbins Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Niki.ai lets its customers order products through its simple chat interface which employs natural language processing and machine learning techniques. Niki.ai passes its customers’ orders to its business partners within seconds, who process and fulfill the orders. Read more on Startup Investments

Niki.ai’s bot which is called Nikibot helps people in India hail a cab, order food, pay for laundry or the electricity bill, among other services. Nikibot enables users to pay for its services directly in the chat, via Paytm, without having to leave Facebook Messenger. The company works on a channel partnership model and generates revenue for every order processed on its platform. It is also now collaborating with various companies to provide them chatbots (for a sum) which they can use in their mobile apps and software. Niki.ai was founded in April 2015 by four IIT Kharagpur alumni, namely, Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, Nitin Babel and Shishir Modi.

AI domain is gaining traction in India. There are several AI based startups in India that are doing research in AI and are producing innovative software or systems based on AI. These days, youngsters in India are well educated and earn well, working for big IT firms. They don’t have the time or patience to go from place to place to buy groceries or to pay their bills or to do shopping for commodities etcetera. They would prefer to do everything at the ‘click of a button’. The services provided by Niki.ai’s Nikibot, fulfills this requirement. Customers can do umpteen number of things through the chat interface that Nikibot provides like hailing a cab, buying groceries and other products, paying bills etcetera. There are many innovative startups like Niki.ai in India which provide essential services to the society. They have the potential to become MNCs but require help in the form of funding, mentoring and incubation. It is heartening to see innovative startups like Niki.ai get funded. We can bet that they will use the funding to expand their business and become MNCs in the future. Read more on Startup News