India's first angel investors, Indian Angel Network (IAN) announced today an undisclosed investment in Chennai-based Uniphore Software Systems, the pioneer in Indian Language Speech Recognition solutions. This round of investment was led by the IAN members, Nagaraja Prakasam and M V Subramanian along with Ray Stata and YourNest Angel Fund.
IAN investor member, Nagaraja Prakasam will join the board the company.
The funding will be primarily used to expand Uniphore's global presence, by foraying into other non-English speaking regions such as South East Asia and the West Asia, where businesses face similar challenges to those Uniphore has been taking on in the Indian context. Uniphore will also look to strengthen its speech-based products, creating more context-aware, personalised applications.
"Customers today demand personalised service delivery in a language of their choice and Uniphore's speech-based solutions are the most intuitive and scalable way to make this happen", said Umesh Sachdev, co-founder and CEO of the company.
Analyst and industry estimates place the global market for enterprise mobility applications at $174 billion by 2017 and the ability to integrate speech into these mobility application is a need. The global speech analytics market is projected to be worth $1.33 billion by 2019. This fast-growing market for speech-based solutions presents an enormous opportunity to Uniphore to take its product portfolio overseas.
MV Subramanian, an IAN investor member said, "Uniphore is the archetype organisation that we like to invest in - very large market, talented entrepreneurs, disruptive technology platform that improves millions of lives. The domain expertise of the co-founders, Umesh and Ravi has also helped them create a strong product."
