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India's venture capital landscape has started demonstrating maturity amid resilience and challenges.
Gnani.ai, a voice-first generative AI company, has secured an investment of Rs 30 crores from Info Edge Ventures in a Series A funding round. According to a press release, founded in 2016 by Ganesh Gopalan and Ananth Nagaraj, Gnani.ai has leveraged their experience from tech giants such as Texas Instruments, IBM, and Aricent to create a unique generative AI platform. The capital from this funding round will be used to drive sales growth and expand Gnani.ai's business across new geographies. Over the past six months, the platform has helped financial institutions collect over USD 2 billion from their end customers. The company's growth has been exponential, securing more than 100 enterprise customers in India and the US. Expressing their excitement about the investment, founders Ganesh Gopalan and Ananth Nagaraj said, "We are thrilled to welcome Info Edge Ventures to our journey. Gnani.ai's generative AI-powered voice automation platform has helped financial institutions collect over USD 2B from their end customers in the last six months. Our proprietary AI platform has helped us grow exponentially in the last few years and secure 100+ enterprise customers in India and the US. This investment will significantly bolster our efforts to expand our sales footprint." Chinmaya Sharma, Partner at Info Edge Ventures, says, "We are excited to invest in Gnani.ai. It is a company that exemplifies our investment thesis for AI. We like to invest in founders who are building to solve a problem and not just to find a use case for AI. Gnani.ai was doing what it was doing before AI became the talk of the town. We like AI as an afterthought!" Gnani.ai has recently announced a series of Voice-first AI Small Language Models (SLMs). VCs funding in India has declined from USD 25.7 billion in 2022 to USD 9.6 billion in 2023, according to Bain & Company report. But despite this drop in deal flow, India upheld its position as the second-largest destination for VC and growth funding in the Asia-Pacific region. Notably, mega-rounds, or funding rounds exceeding USD 100 million, plummeted by almost 70 per cent, from 48 to just 15. Conversely, small and medium deals, defined as those under USD 50 million, experienced a milder compression, declining by about 45 per cent from 1,501 to 852. Funding in a voice-first generative AI company like Gnani.ai reflects that the outlook for India's private equity and venture capital market will be positive this year. (ANI)
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