Gupshup, a global leader in conversational engagement, announced today the acquisition of AskSid, a leading Conversational AI provider to top ecommerce and retail companies around the world. AskSid’s full-stack AI solution including the Retail AI brain, strengthens Gupshup’s customer experience (CX) offerings and will help make the entire shopping journey – across pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase phases – fully conversational.
Headquartered in Bengaluru, AskSid is helping many global brands like AkzoNobel, Danone, Wolford, Akris and Himalaya Wellness deliver impactful shopping experiences to customers through AI-powered conversations, driving faster sales. The tech startup has operations in 25+ countries and supports over 100 languages. By automating 92% of support conversations with a self-service model, AskSid customers have reported an average 25% reduction in operational expenditure, while boosting order conversion rate by 30%.
“Conversational commerce is about to transform shopping, both online and offline. Gupshup is building the most comprehensive conversational commerce solution and AskSid’s deep-domain AI offering will help us bring even more advanced capabilities to ecommerce and retail businesses worldwide”, said Beerud Sheth, Co-founder and CEO, Gupshup. “We welcome the AskSid team onboard and look forward to collaborating with major brands across the world to enable next-gen shopping experiences.”
Per a recent report by McKinsey, ecommerce could grow up to 5x faster compared to pre-pandemic times. “This presents a huge opportunity for Retail and ecommerce brands – but only if they are able to provide expert guidance anytime, anywhere to their consumers, which is exactly what AskSid delivers”, said Sanjoy Roy, Co-founder and CEO, AskSid. “Together with Gupshup, we will help businesses drive richer conversational experiences.”
“We are very happy to join forces with Gupshup and look forward to helping more brands personalize their shopping experiences at scale,” said Dinesh Sharma, Co-founder and CTO, AskSid.
AskSid’s angel investors include well-known technology leaders Rajan Anandan (ex-Google), Krishnakumar Natarajan (ex-Mindtree), Parthasarathy NS (ex-Mindtree) and Radha R (ex-Microsoft and Mindtree). The AI startup is also backed by Techstars (first institutional investor in AskSid), a global seed accelerator that mentors some of the world’s most successful startups.
“AskSid’s retail-specific models help global retail brands deliver impactful shopping experiences to their consumers. I am impressed with AskSid’s powerful AI capabilities and their ability to acquire global brands so readily”, said Vijay Tirathrai, Managing Director at Techstars. “The merger with Gupshup is the next logical step and a great strategic fit as their deep vertical AI expertise in retail now gets augmented by Gupshup on a global scale in CPaaS and CX, delivering immense value to enterprise customers.”
About Gupshup
Gupshup enables better customer engagement through conversations. Gupshup is the leading conversational engagement platform, powering over 6 billion messages per month. Across verticals, thousands of large and small businesses in emerging markets use Gupshup to build omni-channel conversational experiences across marketing, sales and support. Gupshup provides a single messaging API for 30+ messaging channels, AI-powered voice solutions, a rich conversational experience-building tool kit, 500+ integrations with leading CRM, eCommerce and Marketing Automation systems and a network of emerging market partnerships across messaging apps, device manufacturers, ISVs and mobile operators. With Gupshup, businesses have made conversations an integral part of their customer engagement success. Visit www.gupshup.io
About AskSid
AskSid is a global conversational solutions company that partners with retail brands to elevate shopping experiences by leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence. Their capabilities extend beyond support automation, extending to insight extraction, analysis, and business opportunity generation, all by leveraging the power of conversational customer data. The ability to extract actionable customer insights has allowed them to create value and bring change to global brands including AkzoNobel, Danone, Wolford, Akris, and Himalaya. AskSid has live implementations in 25+ countries and supports 100+ international languages, managing millions of satisfied customers the world over. Visit www.asksid.ai
