Cloud telephony firm Exotel acquires conversational AI platform Cogno AI

Cloud telephony firm Exotel said it has acquired Cogno AI, an artificial intelligence-powered omnichannel cloud communication platform. The acquisition will add conversational AI and co-browsing capabilities to its product suite and bring it one step closer towards being an AI-powered customer engagement platform.

The funding amount for the transaction, which is a part cash and part stock deal, was not disclosed.

Cogno AI is a conversational AI platform with an omnichannel chatbot, live chat, and co-browse capabilities. It provides customer engagement solutions 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 banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) with over 60 large enterprise customers including the State Bank group, HDFC group, ICICI group, Kotak group, Aditya Birla group, and many more.

In September 2021, Exotel announced a $35 million Series C funding, and over the last 12 months, the company has raised $55 million through debt and equity funding. Exotel and contact centre software provider Ameyo recently announced their merger and now with Cogno AI, the organization is currently growing 70 per cent YoY and is at an ARR of $50 million with a target to hit an annual run rate of $200 million over the next three years.

Exotel has been strengthening its offerings with Ameyo and now Cogno AI to offer a bouquet of customer engagement solutions all delivered seamlessly through the cloud. This first of a kind offering in emerging markets allows enterprises to engage with customers across channels, processes, and devices to enhance the omnichannel journeys.

“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. “Exotel and Ameyo together serve the largest brands in emerging geographies. This acquisition puts Exotel ahead of the market by offering an AI-powered Customer Engagement Platform on the cloud to its customers”

Aman Goel, co-founder, and CEO of Cogno AI said, "We started four years ago with chatbots as our primary offering, and then went on to add more customer engagement-related offerings in our suite,” “Working directly with enterprise clients helped us 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.”

Cogno AI’s team of 98 joins the Exotel family to build the combined vision of bringing together all the tools for customer engagement in one place.  Vertices Partners acted as the legal counsel to Cogno AI and Bangalore-based investment bank, IndigoEdge, was the banker for the transaction.