An Indonesia-based investment firm, RMKB Ventures, invests in Vahan, an AI startup. Also participated in seed funding round are a number of Googlers, Spike Ventures, and some India’s startup executives. Funding will be used for product and team development to support expansion plans in India, Indonesia, and the Middle East.
Co-founded by Madhav Krishna and Mohammed Abdoolcarim, Vahan’s vision is to build an automated voice assistant platform for business, like Siri or Alexa, which can be implemented in popular messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp.
Krishna’s background is in AI and machine learning. He’s graduated from Columbia University, while Abdoolcarim, a Stanford graduate, was a Google and Siri’s Product Manager.
Vahan‘s solution resembles chatbot with a twist. It has the ability to understand conversational voice input, currently accommodating English and local languages in India, especially Hindi (including daily conversation). Vahan said its current product development is to understand conversations in Indonsian.
Vahan targets to capture one million users in India and Indonesia. It’s expecting to raise Series A funding this year.
Chatbot-based customer service solutions in Indonesia have started to emerge. Some of them are Kata.ai and Bang Joni. Nevertheless, no development that we know of is currently built for voice-based conversations.
Abdoolcarim said to DailySocial that the company is exploring a partnership with Go-Jek and Grab. The following video explains Vahan’s capability:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4aNqRxXbCo
RMKB Ventures‘ Founding Partner, Ronald Ishak, to DailySocial said, “We see the potential [system] disruption of customer service systems using machine learning that becomes increasingly sophisticated. We also support founders tahat having a strong background, graduated from Stanford University and once led [product development] in Siri. Vahan built Siri for business and we are very excited to work with them.”
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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian