Our Investment in Avaamo

Over the past few years, there has been significant media attention around chatbots. While this term has been overused and overmarketed, beneath the surface are new technologies that are fundamentally transforming how businesses interact with their customers and employees alike. Given Wipro’s global customer footprint, we have had more than just a ringside view to these trends - we are actively collaborating with our clients, developing new approaches and helping them in their digital transformation journey.

One of our earliest investments - Avaamo - is helping companies do just that. Avaamo recently raised $14.2M in a Series A round led by Intel Capital, with participation from Wipro Ventures and other existing investors. Avaamo is a deep-learning software company that specializes in conversational interfaces to solve specific, high impact problems in the enterprise. The company is creating fundamental building blocks across a broad area of neural networks, speech synthesis and deep learning to make conversational computing for the enterprise a reality.

Conversational interfaces, coupled with deep learning, have a tremendous scope of applicability. These technologies enable companies to address existing challenges and create better experiences for employees, customers and suppliers. We view conversational AI as an infrastructure layer technology that is rapidly becoming an integral part of the enterprise IT stack. Conversational interfaces reduce friction, enabling interactions and processes to be smarter. With "smart" interactions, customers or employees can quickly find the information they need with virtual assistants, leading to less time spent, greater accuracy in results and an overall better experience. With "smart" processes, back-office tasks related to HR, Payroll, and Help Desk can be simplified and automated.

Not surprisingly, one of the things that impressed us the most about Avaamo was the founding team. Ram and Sriram bring an extraordinary wealth of experience in enterprise software and have a deep understanding of the market landscape as well as the needs of enterprise customers. Furthermore, they have a proven ability to deliver solutions at scale. This was an important consideration from our perspective as a strategic investor, as we seek to work with our portfolio companies to bring joint solutions to our Global 2000 customers. Ram was acutely aware of the value Wipro could bring as a strategic partner, just as we were convinced of the potential impact Avaamo could have on our customers.

Now, two years after our initial investment, we have achieved significant joint customer traction in the Finance, Telco and Retail verticals worldwide. Although it is still early days in the company’s journey, we remain excited about their technology and customer traction and are pleased to be a partner of and investor in Avaamo.

About the Authors

Venu Pemmaraju - Managing Partner

Venu is a Managing Partner at Wipro Ventures and serves as a board observer for Avaamo, CloudGenix, Emailage and ImanisData.

Prior to this he was an Investment Director at Intel Capital. He is an MBA (Finance and Strategy) from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Houston and a BS in Electronics & Communication Engineering from IIT, Kharagpur.

Venu has a successful track record in identifying investment opportunities around open-source software, cloud and mobile technologies.

Daniel Greene - Principal

Daniel is a Principal at Wipro Ventures. He holds an MBA from the University of California, Irvine, and a Bachelors degree in Bioengineering from UCLA.

Daniel has an investment focus on emerging technology in the Financial Services and Healthcare industries.

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