Webaroo Inc.’s conversational messaging platform Gupshup has acquired Active.Ai, a conversational AI platform for banks and fintech organisations, and is in talks with possible investors for a pre-IPO investment round of $100 million to $200 million or potentially more, according to a top official.
Gupshup co-founder and CEO Beerud Sheth stated the “mid-sized” transaction was largely cash-based. “We wanted Active.founders AI’s and workers to continue,” he said. In the process, several institutional investors have pulled out.
Active.ai was founded in 2016 by Ravi Shankar, Shankar Narayanan, and Parikshit Paspulati, with funding from Kalaari Capital, Chiratae Ventures, Vertex Ventures, Creditease Holdings, and Dream Incubator.
Headquartered in Singapore, Active.Ai serves banking, financial BFSI customers across 43 countries with a Conversational Banking as a Service (CBaaS) platform that helps clients engage with millions of consumers.
“Gupshup and Active.Ai have a very high customer overlap as a lot of our banking customers use Acitve.ai for developing chat bots and so on,” noted Sheth, “So this acquisition accelerates our ability to do this specialised capability in the BFSI vertical which was part of our roadmap anyway.”
This is Gupshup’s second acquisition in the year 2022. It bought cloud telephony company Knowlarity Communications in February, which is backed by investors like Sequoia Capital and Mayfield.
Gupshup acquired Dotgo, a rich communications services (RCS) firm based in New Jersey, in September of last year.
Sheth claimed a few other acquisitions are in the works but wouldn’t say which ones.
In its current form, Gupshup enables digital commerce businesses with conversational messaging across channels. On the customer-front, the conversational journey enables product discovery, payment, delivery tracking, feedback and support among other features.
