Exotel Acquires Cogno AI, becomes the Emerging Market’s First AI-powered Cloud Customer Engagement Platform

Cogno AI is a conversational AI platform with an omnichannel chatbot, live chat, and co-browse capabilities. It provides the ultimate customer engagement solution for enterprises including monitoring customer sentiments, seamless onboarding of new customers, zero contact resolution for existing customers, and various digital sales and support use cases. Cogno AI is currently the market leader in BFSI with 60+ large enterprise customers including the State Bank group, HDFC group, ICICI group, Kotak group, Aditya Birla group, and many more.

In September 2021, Exotel announced a $35 million Series C funding, and over the last 12 months, the company has totally raised $55 million through debt and equity funding. Exotel & Ameyo recently announced their merger and now with Cogno AI, the organization is currently growing 70% YoY and is at an ARR of $50 million with a target to hit an ARR of $200 million over the next 3 years.

Exotel has been strengthening its offerings with Ameyo and now with Cogno AI, Exotel offers a bouquet of customer engagement solutions all delivered seamlessly through the cloud. This first of the kind offering in emerging markets allows enterprises to engage with customers across channels, processes, and devices to enhance the omnichannel journeys.

“Distributed workforce, adoption of digital channels, and conversational AI are clear trends in the customer engagement space. With the acquisition of Cogno AI, Exotel brings conversational AI capabilities to its contact center offering,” said Shivku, Co-founder and CEO of Exotel. “Exotel and Ameyo together serve the largest brands in emerging geographies. This acquisition puts Exotel ahead of the market by offering an AI-powered Customer Engagement Platform on the cloud to its customers”

“I would like to thank my co-founder Harshita, our mentors, and our amazing team members for helping us build Cogno AI. We started 4 years ago with chatbots as our primary offering, and then went on to add more customer engagement-related offerings in our suite,” said Aman Goel, Co-founder, and CEO of Cogno AI. “Working directly with enterprise clients helped us get the right feedback and build a product-market fit for the BFSI space. We see tremendous synergies with Exotel and Ameyo, and through the combination, we can bring a lot of added value to our customers.”

“Building Cogno AI has been an amazing journey. I’m extremely thankful to our customers for having trust in us and helping us gain market leadership in the Indian BFSI space. Our focus has always been on how we can serve our customers better, how we can solve their problems, and delight them at the same time. Along with Exotel and Ameyo, we’re sure to add great value to our customers through our AI-powered Cloud Customer Engagement Platform.” said Harshita Srivastava, Co-founder, and CTO of Cogno AI.

Cogno AI’s team of 98 joins the Exotel family to build the combined vision of bringing together all the tools for customer engagement in one place. The transaction is part cash and part stock deal. Vertices Partners acted as the legal counsel to Cogno AI and Bangalore-based investment bank, IndigoEdge, was the banker for the transaction.