Indian Angel Network to invest in Chennai-based start-up Uniphore Software Systems

Indian Angel Network (IAN), a network of angel investors investing in start-ups and early stage ventures, has made an undisclosed investment in Chennai-based Uniphore Software Systems.

This round of investment was led by IAN members Nagaraja Prakasam and M V Subramanian along with Ray Stata and YourNest Angel Fund. Prakasam will join Uniphore's board, which offers Indian language speech recognition solutions.

The funding will be primarily used to expand Uniphore's global presence, by foraying into other non-English speaking regions such as South East Asia and the Middle East, where businesses face similar challenges like in India. 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. We are delighted to partner with a strong team of investors who can help realise our vision and aggressive growth expectations,'' Sachdev added.

Analyst and industry estimates place the global market for enterprise mobility applications at $174 billion by 2017 and the ability to integrate speech into these mobility application is a clear and present need.

Furthermore, the global speech analytics market is projected to be worth $1.33 billion by 2019. This fast-growing market for speech-based solutions presents an enormous opportunity to Uniphore to take its product portfolio overseas.

Nagaraja Prakasam said: ''Continuing on our theme on backing inclusive innovations, we are optimistic of the success of Uniphore, which has already completed six successful years. In a country of 1.2 billion people where only 250 million speaks English, vernacular speech recognition can enable financial inclusion to information dissemination to farmers. Uniphore is also a great example of solving problems of billion people which opens opportunity for another 4 billion in emerging nations. We feel the passion Umesh and Ravi bring along and their domain knowledge and expertise makes all this possible.''

''Uniphore is the archetype organisation that we like to invest in – very large market, talented entrepreneurs, disruptive technology platform that improves millions of lives. The domain expertise of the co-founders, Umesh and Ravi has also helped them create a strong product,'' M V Subramanian added.