7/26/2018 Zack Fishman
Illinois alumni run an India-based startup that develops chatbots and has a promising near future.
Written by Zack Fishman
Two University of Illinois engineering alumni will soon be celebrating five years of growth, diversification, and investment in their successful chatbot startup.
Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev founded Haptik in August 2013 and launched a mobile application of the same name to the Indian market in early 2014. Initially, Haptik served as a virtual assistant that connected users with experts over chat to provide services like booking flights, ordering food, and answering a variety of questions.
But since changing focus in 2016 to the development of chatbots — artificial intelligence programs that converse with users through text — the India-based startup has grown beyond its direct-to-consumer app and additionally creates chatbots for other businesses. Haptik now has about 140 employees and is one of the top five largest “conversational AI” companies in the world.
Vaish, who graduated with a degree in Industrial Engineering and describes Rajdev and himself as “really proud Illini,” explains that early involvement in the personal assistant field helped them find success later on.
“Because we started much earlier than most other competitors in this market, we ended up building up a lot of technology and a fairly large feature set,” says Vaish.
Employing chatbots in several ways, Haptik’s current “feature set” includes a revamped mobile app (with the experts now replaced with bots) and options for outside companies like customer service, advertising, and website implementation.
Some of Haptik’s most notable work includes Coca-Cola India’s chatbot on Facebook Messenger, along with Samsung’s “My Assistant” app pre-installed on every Galaxy S7 in India. Other recognizable clients include HDFC Life, Amazon Pay, and KFC.
But Haptik’s biggest news comes from a major investment from one of India’s largest digital product companies. Times Internet is the digital division of The Times of India, the most widely circulated English-language newspaper in the world, and in 2016 they invested $11.2 million into Vaish and Rajdev’s startup. Vaish describes Times Internet’s role as a “majority strategic investor” that still allows Haptik to function at its own pace.
“There’s no rush to receive the next investment or return capital,” says Vaish. “We are given as long as it takes but eventually we will return good value back to them.”
Five years after its founding, Vaish and Rajdev’s business is thriving with significant funding and growing markets, in contrast to half of all startups that fail by this stage. Vaish credits “a great deal of perseverance and a little bit of luck” for his company’s success.
“If you keep going after the goal and you happen to be in the right place at the right time, things will go well for you,” he says. He also notes that Haptik avoided conflicts that hurt the progress of other businesses, such as significant disagreement between founders or a work environment unconducive to success.
So what lies in store for Haptik’s future? “We joke that global domination is what we’re going after,” says Vaish, referring to expansion into international markets. Haptik is currently providing chatbot services to some companies in the United States, and they have plans to expand their business further into both the U.S. and East Asia.
“We’ll be going after whatever the market has to give us,” he says.