Reliance Jio Acquires 87% Stake in Mumbai-Based Haptik For Rs.700 Crore

Reliance Industries, through its subsidiary Reliance Jio Digital Services Ltd. has acquired Mumbai-based enterprise conversational AI startup Haptik. The total transaction size, including primary capital investment, is about 700 Cr (~100 million USD), with 230 Cr as the consideration for the initial business transfer from Haptik to Jio. The Haptik team will continue to drive the growth of the business, including the enterprise platform as well as digital consumer assistants. On a fully diluted basis, RIL will hold about 87% stake in the company, with the rest with Haptik’s founders and employees.
Haptik will remain committed to its overall Vision and Mission, that it has pursued since 2013.
“The investment by Jio will give us the support and resources we need to massively scale up our operations – enhancing and expanding our platform into one of the world’s largest, with an addressable market opportunity of over 1 billion users in India. This partnership will also give a boost to Haptik’s existing enterprise business, augmenting our ability to build innovative solutions for enterprise partners across the globe,” Haptil said in a blog post.
Moreover, Reliance Jio will now have the opportunity to leverage Haptik’s capabilities across various devices and touchpoints in the consumer’s journey.
Speaking about the acquisition,  Aakrit Vaish, Co-Founder & CEO of Haptik said, “We started with the idea that Conversational interfaces will cause a paradigm shift in the way people get things done. Over the course, we have built various products across both consumer and enterprise businesses, with the backbone always being a full stack chat and voice enabled AI technology platform. We truly believe now is the opportunity to serve the next billion users who come online, and who better to partner with than one of the world’s largest digital ecosystems in Jio. We look forward to using the capital and strategic opportunity to exponentially scale up the business across various product lines.”
Akash Ambani, Director, Reliance Jio, said “This strategic investment underlines our commitment to further boost the digital ecosystem and provide Indian users conversational AI enabled devices with multilingual capabilities. We believe voice interactivity will be the primary mode of interaction for digital India. We are delighted to announce this partnership, and look forward to the highly experienced team of Haptik in realizing this vision for greater connectivity and rich communication experiences to the billion-plus Indian consumers.”
Times Internet, who invested in Haptik in 2016, will now be exiting the business as part of this transaction.