Niki is an artificial intelligence company headquartered in

Bangalore, Karnataka Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...

. It was founded in May 2015 by

IIT Kharagpur Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT Kharagpur) is a Public university, public institute of technology established by the Government of India in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. Established in 1951, the institute is the first of the Indi ...

graduates Sachin Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, Shishir Modi and Nitin Babel. The Niki android app was launched for a limited beta in June 2015, then released for public during YourStory's TechSparks 2015, and is a Tech30 company. The company raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Unilazer Ventures, a Mumbai-based VC firm founded by

Ronnie Screwvala Rohinton Soli "Ronnie" Screwvala (born 8 September 1956) is an Indian entrepreneur. He has been named on Esquire's List of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century and ranked 78 among the 100 most influential people in the world on t ...

, in October 2015. This was followed by another seed funding round by

Ratan Tata Ratan Naval Tata, GBE (born 28 December 1937) is an Indian industrialist and former chairman of Tata Sons. He was also the chairman of the Tata Group from 1990 to 2012, serving also as interim chairman from October 2016 through February 2017 ...

in May 2016. The company then raised US$2 million in Series A round of funding from SAP.iO, existing investors and some US and Germany-based investors, among others. Niki.ai shut down in Oct 2021 as per media reports. Website not working.

Product

The product is an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

-powered

chatbot A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behav ...

which works as an

intelligent personal assistant An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. The term "chatbot" is sometimes used to refer to virtual ...

, named Niki. Leveraging natural language processing and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

, Niki presents a chat-based

natural language user interface Natural-language user interface (LUI or NLUI) is a type of computer human interface where linguistic phenomena such as verbs, phrases and clauses act as UI controls for creating, selecting and modifying data in software applications. In interface d ...

to the users where they can interact with Niki in their natural language. Niki understands how users chat in India, deciphers the words, in the context of product/services that they would like to purchase, and comes up with apt recommendations. Initially, it was only available on the Android platform as a

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...

. The company has expanded its operations to the

Facebook Messenger Messenger is a proprietary instant messaging app and platform developed by Meta Platforms. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the company revamped its messaging service in 2010, released standalone iOS and Android apps in 2011, and ...

and Apple iOS platforms. The company aims to soon be present on more messaging platforms like Slack and

WhatsApp WhatsApp (also called WhatsApp Messenger) is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). It allows use ...

. The company currently provides 20+ services to over 2 million consumers, covering a wide spectrum ranging from utility services like mobile recharge, bill payments, travel services like cabs, buses, hotels and entertainment services like movies and events. Services such as flights and healthcare are also planned.

Partnerships

In September 2017,

Infosys Infosys Limited is an Indian multinational information technology company that provides business consulting, information technology and outsourcing services. The company was founded in Pune and is headquartered in Bangalore. Infosys is the s ...

Finacle joined with Niki.ai to provide chat-based service to banking customers. In August 2017, Niki partnered with LazyPay to enable a 'buy now, pay later' feature for its users.

References

External links

*
Blog
* {{Medium.com, niki.ai, niki.ai
SAP.IO
Applications of artificial intelligence Natural language processing Applied machine learning