Exotel acquires Cogno AI

Customer communication platform Exotel on Thursday said it has acquired Cogno AI, an AI-powered omnichannel cloud communication platform.

The deal size was not disclosed by the company.

With this acquisition, Exotel adds conversational AI and co-browsing capabilities to its product suite and moves one step closer towards being an AI-powered customer engagement platform, a statement said.

In September, Exotel had raised USD 35 million (about Rs 259.5 crore) in funding from IIFL AMC, Sistema Asia Fund, CX Partners, Singularity Growth Opportunities Fund and others. Over the last 12 months, the company has totally raised USD 55 million through debt and equity funding. Exotel and Ameyo had recently announced their merger and now with Cogno AI, the organisation is currently growing 70 per cent year-on-year and is at an ARR (annual run rate) of USD 50 million with a target to hit an ARR of USD 200 million over the next three years.

''In the short term, the acquisition helps to gain access to each other's customers and opens possibilities to cross-sell Cogno AI's products - live chat, bots, co-browsing to Exotel customers, and Exotel's products - contact center and communication APIs to Cogno AI's customers,'' the company said.

It added that the long-term plan is to build a single unified customer engagement stack powered by AI. Cogno AI is a conversational AI platform with an omnichannel chatbot, live chat, and co-browse capabilities. It provides the ultimate customer engagement solution for enterprises including monitoring customer sentiments, seamless onboarding of new customers, zero contact resolution for existing customers, and various digital sales and support use cases.

Cogno AI is currently the market leader in BFSI with over 60 large enterprise customers, including the State Bank group, HDFC group, ICICI group, Kotak group, Aditya Birla group and others.

"Distributed workforce, adoption of digital channels, and conversational AI are clear trends in the customer engagement space. With the acquisition of Cogno AI, Exotel brings conversational AI capabilities to its contact center offering," said Shivku, co-founder and CEO of Exotel.

Aman Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cogno AI, added that working directly with enterprise clients helped it get the right feedback and build a product-market fit for the BFSI space. ''We see tremendous synergies with Exotel and Ameyo, and through the combination, we can bring a lot of added value to our customers," he stated. Vertices Partners acted as the legal counsel to Cogno AI and Bengaluru-based investment bank, IndigoEdge, was the banker for the transaction.

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