Reliance Jio to acquire Haptik for Rs 200 crore: Report

Reliance Jio is said to be acquiring Haptik, one of the largest conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platforms in the world, for more than Rs 200 million, media reported.

A report on Inc42.com on late Thursday said the transaction is expected to be completed this week. Referring a firm document, the report mentioned that "Reliance Jio Services Ltd and Haptik founders Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev have signed a Business Transfer Agreement".

When contacted, Haptik refused to give an official response on the report. A spokesman for Reliance Jio said the company "does not comment on market speculation."

Industry sources, however, said that the agreement is likely to be at an early stage. If the news turns out to be true, Jio, with its wide reach, will be in a formidable position to challenge Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant; both are growing rapidly in the Indian market through smart home speakers and another "connected" Internet of Things. (IoT) devices.

In January 2018 Reliance Jio was heading the subscription race with the addition of 93.24 lakh subscribers across India, the highest among all other telecom service providers.

Recent data published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) showed that the subscriber base of Jio was almost near 29 crores.

Having grown 10 times in revenue in just one year, Haptik partners and clients include Coca-Cola, HDFC Life, Samsung, Edelweiss Tokyo, Goibibo, Amazon Pay, Club Mahindra, ICICI Bank and Tata Docomo among others.

Earlier this month, the Maharashtra government partnered with Haptik to develop a chatbot for the purpose of disseminating effective information to the citizens.

Founded by Vaish and Rajdev, both engineering graduates from the University of Illinois, in August 2013, Haptik focuses on key customer engagement use cases, such as customer support, comments, order status and live chat, and has processed more than one billion interactions to date.

In April 2016, Times Internet led a round of B Series investments in Haptik, which made it one of the most well-funded independent AI conversation companies in the world.

Chatbots are slowly becoming the default customer service solution for most services, and Haptik is one of those platforms: it creates applications for consumers, publishers and companies.

Recently PeopleStrong, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) HR technology and solutions company told, "More than 50 per cent of Indian retail companies will operate on AI by 2020."

According to an analysis by Accenture, AI has the potential to add $ 957 billion to the Indian economy in 2035.