Coinbase, one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, announced on Tuesday that it has acquired conversational AI startup Agara. This marks Coinbase’s first ever acquisition in India. Both companies have not disclosed the financial details of the deal but unconfirmed reports claims that Coinbase has made the acquisition for $40 Mn. There is also no clarity whether this is an all cash or stock and cash deal.
Agara essentially seeks to help companies in improving their digital customer service experience by offering slew of services including human like voice chat bots. Its voice chat bots leverage the cutting-edge and modern day technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Through this acquisition, we’ll be able to provide customers with new personalized, intelligent and real-time support options. In addition to Agara’s technology, the Agara team brings deep expertise in ML and NLP to Coinbase and augment our existing product, engineering and data team, Coinbase said in blog post.
This year Coinbase has shown strong intent and interest in investing in India. Earlier this year, the U.S. based crypto startup announced its plans for building a tech hub in the country and even hired Google Pay executive Pankaj Gupta to implement this ambitious plan.
However, much before announcing this plan, Coinbase has been actively investing in Indian startup ecosystem. It is one of the investors in domestic crypto exchanges like CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber, both of which joined India’s ballooning unicorn club earlier this year. Coinbase also went public last year
Its maiden acquisition Agara counts marquee investors like Blume Ventures, RTP Global, Kleiner Perkins among its other investors. It was founded in 2017 by Abhimanyu Singh, Pankaj Gupta and Arjun Maheswaran.
Apart from Agara, India’s voice conversational space counts startups like Haptik, Arya.ai, Avaamo and GoHero.ai.
