Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) today announced that its subsidiary Reliance Jio Digital Services Limited (RJDSL) has entered into a definitive business transfer agreement with Haptik Infotech Pvt Ltd (Haptik). On a fully diluted basis Reliance will hold about 87% of the business with the rest being held by Haptik founders and employees through stock option grants.
The deal is estimated at about Rs. 700 crore, with Rs. 230 crore as the consideration for the initial business transfer. Haptik said that it will remain committed to its overall Vision and Mission,that it has pursued since 2013. The Haptik team will continue to drive growth of the business, including the enterprise platform as well as digital consumer assistants.
Reliance Jio will leverage Haptik’s capabilities across various devices and touch points. The investment focus is on enhancement and expansion of the platform. This partnership will also give a boost to Haptik’s existing
enterprise grade business, with the company continuing to build innovative AI solutions for corporates globally.
Haptik said that Times Internet, who invested in the company in 2016 will now be exiting the business as part of this transaction.
Commenting on the latest deal, 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.
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.