Airtel Acquires Bengaluru-Based AI Start-Up AuthMe

Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Wednesday said it had acquired AuthMe ID Services, a Bengaluru based start-up focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions.

As part of the "acquihire" deal, the core team of AuthMe will join Airtel and will be a part of Airtel X Labs in Bengaluru, the company said, without disclosing the transaction amount.

Airtel set up Airtel X Labs with the aim of driving cutting edge innovation in the areas of AI, IoT (Internet of Things), augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).

"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," Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO, Bharti Airtel, said in a statement.

"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 mn plus customers," Mehta said.

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

One of these solutions is called the "Callup AI" which has created a chat and voice assistant that uses the power of AI to quickly and effectively resolve customer queries over email, chat and phone calls.

Its features include voice integration, unsupervised learning capabilities. Built for vernacular languages with zero integration time, 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 documents, bank/credit card/loan statements, mark sheets, and can be customised to process known formats of other documents. It can pick up any language with standard fonts.