Vernacular.ai secures $5.1 mn led by Exfinity Ventures

Vernacular.ai on Wednesday said it has raised USD 5.1 million (about Rs 38.7 crore) in funding, led by Exfinity Ventures and IAN Fund, Kalaari Capital.

AngelList, LetsVenture, also participated in the series A round, a statement said. The fresh capital will be used to fund the company's global expansion into Southeast Asia and the US and towards R&D to further enhance its proprietary AI-based voice automation platform, it added.

"As we evolve our voice AI platform and continue to expand our customer-base in new markets, we are happy to see the increased investor confidence in our model. This Series A round will be used to fund the company's expansion outside India and to drive innovation through rigorous R&D across multiple verticals of our business," Vernacular.ai co-founder and CEO Sourabh Gupta said.

He added that contingency plans of companies have significantly increased dependency on voice automation, and the company is well placed to serve this need, globally.

The company was founded in Bengaluru by two IIT Roorkee graduates - Sourabh Gupta and Akshay Deshraj, along with the founding team - Prateek Gupta, Pravendra Singh and Abhinav Tushar.

Vernacular.ai's suite of speech and language solutions enables enterprises to convert audio to text by applying powerful neural network models in an easy-to-use API.

The API recognises over 160 dialects in 10 different Indian languages to support the enterprise user base.