Bharti Airtel buys AI startup AuthMe

Indian telecoms operator Bharti Airtel has acquired AuthMe ID Services (AuthMe), a Bengaluru-based start-up focused on artificial intelligence (AI) based solutions, in a bid to bloster its AI portfolio.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

As part of the deal, the core team of AuthMe will join Airtel and be a part of Airtel X Labs in Bengaluru.

Airtel set up Airtel X Labs to drive innovation in the areas of AI, IoT, AR and VR and is “building a world-class team” for the facility, the operator said in a statement released on Wednesday.

“We are thrilled to bring on board a bunch of highly talented people who share our passion for building exciting digital solutions that benefit our customers,” Bharti Airtel global CIO Harmeen Mehta said.

“We are rapidly scaling up Airtel X Labs, our digital innovation factory, and these new solutions will accelerate our journey towards rolling out intuitive digital products, particularly in vernacular languages, for our 430 million plus customers.”

In addition, Airtel has acquired the intellectual proprietary rights for two flagship solutions developed by AuthMe.

One of the solutions is called Callup AI, which has created a chat and voice assistant that uses AI to quickly and effectively resolve customer queries over email, chat and phone calls. The solution is used by 10 companies across three countries in banking, finance, payments and housing domains.

The other solution, the “Fintech OCR”, is an end to end Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline built for financial documents. The application is designed for processing KYC docs, bank/credit card/loan statements, mark sheets, and can be customized to process known formats of other documents. It can pick up any language with standard fonts, Airtel said.

In a separate announcement, Airtel said it has launched its VoLTE services to Bengal and Sikkim to enable customers in all towns across the two states to enjoy HD quality voice calls with faster call setup time.