Airtel Acquihires Bengaluru-Based Startup AuthMe To Strengthen Its AI Portfolio

[caption id="attachment_28934" align="aligncenter" width="1017"] Image credit: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr[/caption] Bharti Airtel on Wednesday announced an acquihire deal with AuthMe ID Services, a Bengaluru-based startup focused on artificial intelligence-based solutions. This deal adds to Airtel's recent initiatives to serve customers with innovative digital products. As part of this venture, the core team of AuthMe will join Airtel and be a part of Airtel X Labs in Bengaluru. They have also acquired the intellectual proprietary rights for two flagship solutions developed by AuthMe. The products are:

1. Callup AI: Callup AI has created a chat and voice assistant that uses the power of AI to quickly and effectively resolve customer queries over email, chat and phone calls. It includes voice integration, unsupervised learning and the application is built for vernacular languages with zero integration time. The solution is used by 10 companies across three countries in banking, finance, payments and housing domains.
2. Fintech OCR: This is an end-to-end Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline built for financial documents. The application is designed for processing KYC docs, bank/credit card/loan statements, mark sheets, and can be customised to process known formats of other documents. It can pick up any language with standard fonts.

Harmeen Mehta, global CIO at Bharti Airtel, said in a statement, “We are thrilled to bring on board a bunch of highly talented people who share our passion for building exciting digital solutions that benefit our customers. We are rapidly scaling up Airtel X Labs, our digital innovation factory, and these new solutions will accelerate our journey towards rolling out intuitive digital products, particularly in vernacular languages, for our 430 mn plus customers.”