Ubona secures Series A Funding from Capital18
Have been aware of Ubona’s funding discussions (well, they raised the funding 2 weeks back), but was 
requested to not divulge till the cat is out of the bag. And now, the news is out in the press
Ubona (read our earlier review), Bangalore based voice recognition startup has raised Series A funding from capital18, Network18’s venture arm.
Ubona launched as a test/foodie service in Bangalore (a PoC to validate/test their voice recognition engine) and most of the readers/users actually took them as a foodie service, a lead-generation model.
But that’s not Ubona’s business.
Ubona licenses it’s software to players in travel/finance/entertainment etc. sector where voice recognition can help these businesses curtail the operational cost.
This funding surely comes as a big thing for JC and his team, as they needed to scale up fast and were looking for funding.
Voice recognition engines will drive the growth of IVR/VAS in India and even though many mobile techies will argue that this technology is no big deal – open source alternative, Sphinx is available and all you need to do is punch in different accents.
But to me, it’s all about packaging and how one can commercialize the product and make it easily integrate with a business process (be it local search or call centers)
Capital18 is Network18’s venture arm which few months back acquired Infomedia, local search player – so expect a synergy there.
What’s your opinion?
good move . if Ubona’s Tech is good than with Ubona + Infomedia combo Capital 18 can give a good competition to JustDial
Niiiiiiice, Ubona is one of the few promising startups with a real tech/IP backbone. Hope they can transition well into the product space.
Ashish,
Very impressed by your insightful comments.
Sarbvir
Oh, this reminds me of those good old days when I was working with Nuance. We used to build cool IVR apps like ordering pizzas on phone and calling wikipedia to answer questions like “what the heck is -insert buzzword here-”. My coolest app was getting mandi prices for agricultural products in Hindi using just a plain phone call by scraping data from Agmarknet site.
IVR has real opportunity in the indian market. The biggest advantage being that this brings the information revolution to the common man in his language. Even to the illiterates. Everybody can deal with voice.
Ashish, you are right when you say that it is all about packaging. But those techies are also missing the point that “punching in the accents” require lot of research with real recorded data. For a country like India, this would simply mean years of research. There is a reason Nuance is where it is.
OnMobile has done some good work in speech recognition for indian languages with the help of a language research institute in Mysore. Then there are a couple of companies with genuine core IP, like Prologix with its Hindi text-to-speech engine and Phonologies with its VoiceXML platform.
Ubona is at the right place and the right time with the right offering. Expect to hear more good news about them.
cheers
nilesh
Another company with core IP in the field is Simmortel Voice . Seems like the speech recognition Indian scene is heating up?
regards,
Bailoo