Till date, Mr. Ratan Tata has invested in over 25 startups, with the most recent being medical emergency startup MUrgency.  Congratulations to Mr. Tata for making his first investment in the AI industry!

Founded in April 2015 by four IIT Kharagpur alumni, Niki.ai is an artificial intelligence-based chatbot. Ratan Tata, the man who doesn’t need an introduction, invests an undisclosed amount in Niki.ai, an Bengaluru-based startup. UTV Founder Ronnie Screwvala’s capital firm Unilazer Ventures also participated in the funding round, and is now an investor in Niki.ai. It uses the state-of-the-art technology like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to converse with humans on a simple chat interface. Moreover, it places orders on their behalf in second with partner businesses. Niki will use these funds to widen its merchant base and to push its technological capabilities.

The super-smart Chatbot offers everyday life’s services such as bill payments, cab booking, recharge, ordering food and  showing live cricket scores. It plans to extend its services to laundry and bus bookings. Initially, the product was on beta version for seven months.

Chatbot features built a dialogue manager that remembers the context of the conversation to engage in a two way dialogue with the users in order to get things done. Niki works on a channel partnership model and generates revenue for every order processed on its platform that is independent, plugged and can be used on any interface.

Globally, chatbots have not been making much news in the recent past. There is no as such competitor to Niki. In india, it would still take time to develop as well as accept this technology.

Takeaways:

• Niki will use these funds to widen its merchant base and to push its technological capabilities.
• The super-smart Chatbot offers everyday life’s services such as bill payments, cab booking, recharge, ordering food and showing live cricket scores.