Airtel buys tech start-up AuthMe as part of AI strategy

Bharti Airtel is set to buy core team and two products from AuthMe ID Services, a Bengaluru based technology start-up focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solutions.
Airtel CIO Harmeen MehtaBharti Airtel, the largest telecom operator in India based on revenue, aims to strengthen its innovative digital products for customers.

The core team of AuthMe will be a part of Airtel X Labs in Bengaluru. Airtel X Labs is making investment as part of the strategy to strengthen its focus on innovation in the areas of AI, IoT, AR and VR. Emerging business areas such as AI, IoT, AR and VR will be the major components of 5G mobile roll out of telecom operators.

“We are scaling up Airtel X Labs, our digital innovation factory, and these new solutions will accelerate our journey towards rolling out intuitive digital products, particularly in vernacular languages, for our 430 million plus customers,” Harmeen Mehta, global CIO of Bharti Airtel, said.

Airtel has also acquired the intellectual proprietary rights for two solutions — Callup AI and Fintech OCR — developed by AuthMe.

Callup AI has created a chat and voice assistant that uses the power of AI to resolve customer queries over email, chat and phone calls. 10 companies across three countries in banking, finance, payments and housing domains use this solution, Airtel said in an official statement on Wednesday.

Fintech OCR is an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline for financial documents for the purpose of processing KYC docs, bank/credit card/loan statements, mark sheets, and can be customised to process known formats of other documents.

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