vernacular chatbot startup secures seed funding from CIIE

The maker of vernacular chatbot platform dhee.ai, DheeYantra Research Labs has raised an undisclosed seed amount from Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), the incubator-cum-investment arm of Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad.

The company in a statement said that Gopal Krishna, former managing director of Maxim India Integrated Circuits, and stock market investor Vijay Kedia had also participated in the round.

The startup’s primary capital utilization will be for strengthening its sales and marketing initiatives while also investing on feature additions such as adding support for more languages for the Indian and international markets.

Founded by Vidhu Bennie and Sreekumar Jairaj last year, DheeYantra is building voice and text-based platform dhee.ai using their proprietary natural language processing stack for Indian vernacular languages.

The company says that businesses can use DheeYantra’s platform and core APIs to reach, onboard, and retain customers that speak native Indian languages.

The firm claims that dhee.ai is pre-trained on domain knowledge and is equipped to handle routine queries, sales, and customer care while helping support and marketing executives improve their productivity.

The chatbot currently supports nine Indian languages including Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Malayalam, and Bengali.

DheeYantra has also developed two other products a vernacular optical character recognition (OCR) system that can read a text in documents written in various Indian languages, and an Indic Transliteration engine which can transliterate across Indian languages.