The Times of India: March 14, 2014
CHENNAI: Leading angel investors Indian Angel Network (IAN) on Thursday announced an undisclosed investment in Chennai-based Uniphore Software Systems, a leading player in Indian language speech recognition solutions.
This round of investment was led by IAN members Nagaraja Prakasam and M V Subramanian along with Ray Stata and YourNest Angel Fund. IAN member Prakasam will join the board of the company.
The funding will be primarily used to expand Uniphore’s global presence, by foraying into other non-English speaking regions such as southeast Asia and the Middle East, the company said. Uniphore will also look to strengthen its speech-based products, creating more context-aware, personalised applications.
“Customers today demand personalised service delivery in a language of their choice and Uniphore’s speech-based solutions are the most intuitive and scalable way to make this happen”, said Umesh Sachdev, co-founder and CEO, Uniphore Software Systems. “This investment is a powerful endorsement of Uniphore’s ability to provide unique and measurable value to our enterprise customers across industries through speech technology,” he said.
The global speech analytics market is projected to be worth $1.33 billion by 2019. The fast-growing market for speech-based solutions presents enormous opportunity to Uniphore to take its product portfolio overseas, the company said. In a country of 1.2 billion people, where only 250 million speak English, vernacular speech recognition can enable financial inclusion to information dissemination to farmers,” IAN’s Prakasam said.
“Uniphore is the archetype organisation that we like to invest in – very large market, talented entrepreneurs, disruptive technology platform that improves millions of lives,” Subramanian said. IAN is one of the largest network of angel investors investing in startups and early stage ventures in Asia.
“Uniphore Software Systems is an early mover in the Indian language speech recognition solutions’ space. With over 60% of non-English speaking population in the world, Uniphore is really addressing a huge potential market,” said Ray Stata. “Uniphore has built path-breaking speech solutions on the top of available technologies,” said Sunil K Goyal, Founder & CEO, YourNest Angel Fund.
Stay updated on the go with Times of India News App. Click here to download it for your device.