Reliance Jio has acquired the Mumbai-based Haptik AI platform for about Rs. 700 crore. As per the deal, Reliance would now hold about 87 percent of the business and the rest by Haptik founders and employees. As an initial investment, the conglomerate would be transferring Rs. 230 crore for growth and expansion.
ALSO READ: 9 Reliance Jio Products And Services Coming Up In 2019
Haptik was founded in 2013 as a chat-based virtual concierge mobile application. It has a big clientele including Samsung, Coca-Cola, Future Retail, KFC, Tata Group, Oyo Rooms and Mahindra Group, among others. Moving forward, the Haptik team will be driving growth of the business, including the enterprise platform as well as digital consumer assistants.
On this new acquisition, Akash Ambani, Director, Reliance Jio pictures a digitally sustained future, “This strategic investment underlines our commitment to further boost the digital ecosystem and provide Indian users conversational AI-enabled devices with multi-lingual capabilities. We believe voice interactivity will be the primary mode of interaction for Digital India. We look forward to working with the experienced team of Haptik in realizing this vision for offering greater connectivity and rich communication experiences to the billion+ Indian consumers.”
ALSO READ: Redmi Pro 2 With Snapdragon 855, Pop-up Camera allegedly spotted
This broadens the company’s ambit of service solutions and needless to say, could be integrated into Jio software suite. Jio seems to be building itself a moat to face the tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Jio could take on Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa in the AI smart assistant war. In time, Haptik neural engine could prove Jio’s backbone for the Internet of Things and Edge computing, thanks to this acquisition.
List of companies Jio has acquired so far
Haptik is one among the galore of companies acquired by Reliance Jio. The company has either completely acquired or has stakes in these companies:
- Saavn: for Music Streaming
- KaiOS: for Jiophone
- Balaji Telefilms: for JioTV and JioCinema
- DEN and Hathway: for Jio GigaFiber
- Radisys: for 5G and IoT
- Embibe: for Online Education
